Design by Collin Oguro
Summer is upon us, and along with warmer weather, school vacations, baseball, and weekend barbecues comes a flood of blockbuster summer movies from Hollywood. This season is to the movie industry as Christmas is to the game industry; all the big studios are looking to cash in, releasing their big-budget films and hoping to pull in droves of moviegoers looking to while away a few hours.
With the increasing cooperation and convergence between Hollywood and the games industry, many of these films have video game counterparts. This shouldn't be surprising. As the immortal Mel Brooks said in Spaceballs as the wise sage Yogurt, movies are all about "moichandising, moichandising, moichandising." Twenty-five years ago, fans ran out and bought Star Wars action figures and toys after seeing the original trilogy. Today's movie fans are compelled to pick up the tie-in video game instead. Over the years, however, movie tie-in games have built up a terrible reputation for being low quality--the infamous E.T. on the Atari 2600, Friday the 13th on the NES, and years of Jurassic Park-based rehashes have all been seen as sloppy, slapdash efforts to cash in on any hype surrounding the movie license.
Thankfully, the attitude surrounding the development of movie-licensed games has changed in recent years. Both Hollywood and the game industry are taking the quality of these games more seriously, and we've seen the results with games such as GoldenEye on the N64 and the EA-published Lord of the Rings beat-'em-ups, which were excellent games. We still get disappointments like Enter the Matrix and flat-out stinkers like Charlie's Angels, but by and large we're seeing an industrywide improvement with movie-licensed games.
GameSpot's 2004 Summer Movie Games Roundup focuses on the games based on the movies of this summer: Van Helsing, Shrek 2, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, Spider-Man 2, King Arthur, Catwoman, and The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth. And yes, we know that no Lord of the Rings film has been released this summer, but The Return of the King DVD has, so that is close enough for us to include a reference to one of the most hotly anticipated real-time strategy games of the year. This feature includes commentary on both the games and the films on which they're based.
GameSpot's 2004 Summer Movie Games Roundup
Summer is the season for movies...and the games that are tied-in with them. In recent years, movie-based games have seen a steady upswing in overall quality. Our Summer Movie Games Roundup gives a breakdown of all the summer movie games for this year, and whether or not you should give them a shot.
