Usually the source material is better than the content it inspires. Today we look at eight video game adaptations that are better than the movies that spawned them. So check out the horrible movies and then revel in the superior video games that they inspired.
If you’ve ever seen the Tommy Wiseau comedy/drama The Room, then you know how beautifully horrific it was. Well the good people at Newgrounds bring you a game based on the laughably horrible movie. You can traverse the world as Johnny, the banker and lead character of The Room. This is the RPG that Bethesda should be working towards, on a grand scale it would be better than Fallout New Vegas or Skyrim.
If you’ve ever seen Mystery Science Theather 3000, or MST3K to the initiated, then you know about the low budget monstrosity Manos: The Hands of Fate. The film lived in relative obscurity until the comedic geniuses behind MST3K lampooned it in 1993. This all leads up to 2012 when FreakZone Games made an 8-bit side scroller based on the low budget eyesore. So if you’re in the mood for a pretty good RPG that will have you fighting satyrs then play this until the cows come home.
Rockstar Games tends to be on the ball with their products, they’re shiny and fun to play. Well in 2013 they took the unbelievably shitty 1979 film The Warriors and made it into a pretty enjoyable video game. The film follows a gang as they make their way home through a very hostile New York City. The game takes place three months before the events portrayed in the film, this time around they’re brawling their way around a gritty 70s landscape. If you love beat ’em up games then you should really check this out, Rockstar rarely disappoints.
Krull, if you haven’t seen it, is a 1983 film that is all about a very very different weapon. It’s not just any weapon, it’s a five pointed blade that is thrown and then caught by the thrower, kind of like the most dangerous boomerang known to man. The film was so bad that the video adaptation couldn’t be worse, and luckily the game was actually okay for the time. The game follows the movie’s plot pretty closely, it’s telling that an 8-bit version of the movie (the game released the same year as the movie) was better than the live action version.
Driven was a 2001 film written by and starring Sylvester Stallone. The plot of the film centered around Sylvester Stallone as an F1 driver, the plot plays out exactly as you would expect so I won’t go into it. The game avoided all of the pesky Sylvester Stallone parts and just focused on the F1 racing, a smart movie considering that the movie was disappointingly bad. So if you’re in the mood for some retro, if 2001 is retro now, racing.
The 2012 film Dredd was an actually pretty good film, but we weren’t so lucky in 1995 when Sylvester Stallone starred in the film Judge Dredd. The 1995 film was just horrible, that’s all that can really be said about it, it was just disappointingly bad and disappointed everyone that saw it. Even with the film straight up sucking the 1995 video game of the same name was actually pretty good. Once again the game follows the plot of the film, and once again the pixelated version was better than the live action debacle that disgraced everyone involved.
In 1959 then unknown director Ed Wood made what is now considered to be the worst film of all time with Plan 9 from Outer Space. Fast forward to 1992 and Konami makes the video game version, which is so much better than the original. To be fair they could have repackaged Tetris and called it the video game adaptation of Plan 9 from Outer Space and it would still be considered a better product than the original. You should really just avoid the film Plan 9 from Outer Space and watch the Tim Burton film Ed Wood.
The SyFy channel pumps out some pure unadulterated shit, most recently they went all out with the films Sharknado and Sharknado 2:The Second One. To further capitalize on the property they made Sharknado: The Video Game, and thankfully the game is better than the film. The game is just an endless runner, nothing fancy, but it doesn’t take much to top the Sharknado films.
