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What Video Game would you most like to see as a movie?

Started by indianasmith, June 19, 2007, 07:41:55 PM

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madbliza

I used to play this ole SNES game called Flashback. Mostly cause I liked falling to my DOOOOoooom.

Still, I wouldn't mind seeing that as a film.

AnubisVonMojo

I never played much Flashback other than a few rounds at a friend's house one night. Yeah, I seem to remember falling a lot in that game. I think that's why I gave up on it. According to Wikipedia though, it's the highest selling French game of all time! Although, given their description, there might be copyright problems with making a movie, as it seems there are Phantasm-like flying balls and They Live type glasses that let you see aliens who are plotting a secret take over of the planet.

Maybe it's time to brush off the SegaCD and dig up a copy of this on eBay somewhere.

"Don't make me stain my last clean shirt with the back of your head." - Shatter Dead
"A grizzly bear with a chainsaw. Now THERE's a killing machine!" - The Simpsons
"I've always wanted to make love to an angry welder." - Jaws: the Revenge

rebel_1812

Quote from: Amontillado on June 28, 2007, 03:18:34 PM
Toobin' was a hard game...

What about Deja Vu? I know that Denzel was just in a movie of the same name, but this could be an awesome noir.

If you want film noir, Shadowrun would be a good bet.  It was a futuristic/fantasy/detective games for the snes.  It wasn't that popular but it was a great game.
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AnubisVonMojo

Quote from: rebel_1812 on June 28, 2007, 05:30:58 PM
Quote from: Amontillado on June 28, 2007, 03:18:34 PM
Toobin' was a hard game...

What about Deja Vu? I know that Denzel was just in a movie of the same name, but this could be an awesome noir.

If you want film noir, Shadowrun would be a good bet.  It was a futuristic/fantasy/detective games for the snes.  It wasn't that popular but it was a great game.

I second that.  :thumbup:

It's so sad that the XBox360 release has been reduced to a first-person shooter though. And here I was waiting for a Deus Ex sized return to my teen years...

"Don't make me stain my last clean shirt with the back of your head." - Shatter Dead
"A grizzly bear with a chainsaw. Now THERE's a killing machine!" - The Simpsons
"I've always wanted to make love to an angry welder." - Jaws: the Revenge

Amontillado

I never had an SNES, so I missed out on a bunch of cool games. I'm always behind the times when it comes to gaming because I've always had to buy the stuff myself. I had to save up my allowance enough to pay for half my NES when I was seven (though I doubt I actually paid half of it). I've never played Super Mario World[/i] or Chrono Trigger or even Zero Wing.

Quote from: tombofanubisdotcom on June 28, 2007, 03:52:24 PM
I rented it for two weeks in a row trying to get through it when I was, like, 10 and remember the unbelievable anger and disappointment when I got to the end, only to learn that I'd either disposed of key pieces of evidence or held on to the wrong items and gotten myself convicted.  Damn it what I wouldn't have given for internet cheat sites in those days. :bluesad:

Hey man, you're better at that game than I was then. My brother, our neighbor, and I spent a good month on that game. Then an additional couple weeks because we too were extremely disappointed with the ending. We found four endings. The first was getting whacked at the end by the same woman by whom you would get whacked by if you ran into her midway through the game. The second was the aforementioned getting yourself convicted. The third was turning yourself in because you found out you were a mobster, and the fourth was getting wacked by a bunch of thugs. My favoirte part of that game was when you found the fat lady in your trunk. If you hit her it would say something like, "Your fist makes waves in her flesh, but she does not wake up." I must have punched her fourty times.

As I was writting this I just had another idea that could possibly make a good movie: Parasite Eve.
If I can build and install a pacemaker in this man\'s chest, I can damn well bouce a microwave off a satellite!

AnubisVonMojo

Hahaha, yeah, I remember laying virtual fist to the fat trunk lady many times too! It's disturbing to think of that now, but it was the funniest thing in the world when I was 10, heh heh.

As Parasite Eve, it's actually based on a book that was already turned into a movie. Check it out here. I imported it on VCD a loooooooooong time ago, and sure enough I've never watched the damn thing. I think you can get it on NetFlix or Blockbuster now thanks to the fine folks at ADV.

"Don't make me stain my last clean shirt with the back of your head." - Shatter Dead
"A grizzly bear with a chainsaw. Now THERE's a killing machine!" - The Simpsons
"I've always wanted to make love to an angry welder." - Jaws: the Revenge

dean

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWL6j0SvqV0



Nuff said really.

Though the Metal Gear Solid and Half Life series are games that feel and play like movies anyways, and therefore really don't need to be made, I'd still really like to see a good movie based on it, just because it's so fun.

In fact:

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaDSpp8evVk


Not a bad effort from just a bunch of students, I do kind of like the sound design in it...

But other than that, there are heaps that would be fun, but for some reason Killer Instinct sits in my mind, just because I like the character design in it:







Take your pick why really... both are good reasons, plus the basic story idea wasn't too bad either [Evil Corporations running world instead of govt. etc]


------------The password will be: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch


Amontillado

Well... look at that.
The cop's line in that Pacman clip is hilarious.

I've been whistling the main song in Deja Vu for days now...
http://www.vgmusic.com/music/console/nintendo/nes/deja3rm.mid
...this song. The link is initially forbidden, so just click the here.

And while everyone's doing the video clip thing...

Part 1
[youtube=400,325]http://youtube.com/watch?v=kLrWgVPeCzI
Part 2
[youtube=400,325]http://youtube.com/watch?v=qyx4nETMVfc
Part 3
[youtube=400,325]http://youtube.com/watch?v=C5I0rTWPvH0

If they don't finish this, I'm gonna be wicked p**sed!
If I can build and install a pacemaker in this man\'s chest, I can damn well bouce a microwave off a satellite!

Inyarear

Quote from: Amontillado on June 27, 2007, 04:09:48 PMYES! I love that game! Up, up, up, down, left, right, start. I also loved in the description of Blackhorn's right-hand-man in the instruction booklet. It read, simply, "Heart of stone, face of bone." I forget what that guy's name was, but he was one of the hardest bosses in the game. After you kill him, isn't that when Astyanax get trapped thus Cutie has to sacrifice herself? Man that last scene in the game in that gif down there used to give me a chill. It was very off-putting for some reason. Oh, and if any of you out there are stuck in the castle maze, you go into the door the skeleton comes out of the ground in front of. Got that?

It's actually pretty funny that you wrote about Astyanax because I thought of that very game after I had written my original post. I was thinking, that or Rygar would make a pretty good fantasy movie.

Yeah, I figured out that clue pretty fast. I think I was only 11 or 12 when I played Astyanax, but the Princess said to look for a sign, you know, and the skeleton was about the only thing that kept appearing out of place.

Since it seems we're all having a movie night now, I've decided to post the cut scenes from a version of the game in which I enhanced the dialogue a bit to make it sound a bit more credibly like something people would actually say. (I also corrected a mistake of cultural translation: Astyanax says he's sixteen, yet he claims to be a freshman in high school. This is not because the kid's been held back a year, but because Nintendo never paid enough to hire some of our native-born American translators. In Japan, elementary school runs through the sixth grade, and then junior high runs another three years, so high school is three years long as well, meaning Astyanax is a first year student by Japanese standards, but a sophmore by American standards.) I also changed a few subtle details in the graphics, specifically Cutie. Hopefully, you'll agree they're an improvement.


Under all the lame dialogue of the original and the rather simple platform-jumping game that went with it, there's actually a pretty good story in there. I wasn't able to do anything about how the characters keep flapping their lips when they're done speaking, but truth be told, I figure any movie based on this game would have plenty of extra dialogue between its characters anyway.


There's a lot of stuff left unsaid here that I tried to slip in between the lines. For example, considering that Princess Rosebud is the only member of Remlia's royalty we ever get to see, why isn't she a queen instead of a princess? My theory is that she hasn't been properly crowned yet because the first thing Blackhorn did in his quest to take over the world was to kill her parents, the King and Queen, and take over their city. Thus, the celebration she mentions at the end was probably going to be her crowning ceremony in addition to a celebration of Remlia's liberation and a chance to pin some medals on Astyanax for it.

Something else I see implied here is that Cutie had something of a crush on Astyanax right from the start, and that she almost certainly made the decision to have him be Remlia's champion and Rosebud's rescuer almost entirely by herself, whatever she pretends about everyone else. (Rosebud et al probably just told her to find them a human champion and left the rest to her discretion.) A movie could delve a lot more deeply into her personality and motives and why she would pursue such an unlikely relationship with a guy who's way too large for her in more ways than one.

Beyond the cut scenes, I also see some highly amusing possibilities for both drama and comedy in just how exactly Astyanax is to explain to his parents where he met this beautiful young woman. She needs a place to stay, and persuading them to let her stay with them is likely to be a tricky business. One thing that might be worth knowing for this purpose is Cutie's real name: I doubt even cute little fairytale creatures would give their children a name like that! I'm thinking "Cutie" is a nickname, and that her real name's initials are Q.T. Again, exploring this possibility makes for good movie fodder.

Then, of course, there are a lot of laughs to be gotten just from the fact that this is a "sixteen-year-old-boy saves the world!" story. For all his manly deeds, Astyanax is still very young and vulnerable at the end. (I figure this might be part of what made him so charming to Cutie in the first place.) How he got such an uncommon name I'd like to know; maybe his parents knew something he didn't? Maybe he actually has more heritage from Remlia than he knows? How he ever managed to survive growing up going to school with a name like that is something I'd like to know too.

These older games might actually be easier to adapt into movies than newer ones precisely because the old video game makers couldn't be bothered to go into depth on these subjects with the young, semi-hyperactive boys who made up a large percentage of their target market. Now that those boys are grown up and could maybe use a good date movie to go see with their wives and girlfriends, though, they might find it worthwhile to adapt these old toys of theirs into some shiny new playthings. The youth market, which continues to hold a lot of sway over what kind of movies are made these days, would also probably be interested in this kind of movie. I don't see why no one has been able to make these video-game-to-movie adaptations work yet.

CoreyHeldpen

How about these?

DESTROY ALL HUMANS!
Just get Tim Burton to direct and we've got this decade's Mars Attacks!

LOST PLANET
Mechs + Giant Bugs = Good Time, whether its a game or a movie. That's a fact of life.

AGE OF MYTHOLOGY
If done like Troy or 300, and if Uwe Boll was kept far away, this could be pure awesome.

FIRE EMBLEM
Now of course, the only way to do this would be anime, everything about the games was in true anime style; the story, the action, the artwork, the characters, everything. Only problem is, there's ten games. Which one would the film be based on?
"The only three things I hate are demons, malfunctioning robots, and monster movies that don't show you the monster."

Inyarear

Quote from: rebel_1812 on June 23, 2007, 09:41:28 PMI was thinking about this question the other day.  Crono Trigger would make a good movie if you wanted a dramatic story with good characters.  A movie based on the Contra series would make a good action film.

Chrono Trigger was an excellent RPG and the story was every bit as good as you say, but the problem with adapting any RPG into a movie is that these RPGs are just too open-ended and lengthy to fit into a movie format. Time constraints mean you have to follow just one storyline and leave a lot of stuff out, and if you do that, the players howl and the non-players don't understand what the heck is going on.

Contra, on the other hand, might make a pretty good mindless action film, but there isn't really much story to elaborate there. If you add a story, the movie just becomes a generic action film that happens to use video game characters' names, and if you don't, then you don't have much of a movie either. Doom had the potential to be a good movie (though it turned out to be mediocre at best) because what story there was raised all kinds of interesting questions a movie could have answered (What does Hell want with a Martian moon base?) or at least explored, and also provided a character (every gamer geek's hero, the lone survivor) who could have been explored in more depth. (What helped him survive where the others didn't? How does he feel about killing off former comrades? How does he cope with the horror of being in a nightmarish situation where only his demonic enemies can hear him scream?) Contra involves a guy (or a couple of guys) going up against an alien overlord that has come to Earth and is trying to take over. Hmmm... Predator rip-off, anyone? I'm not sure what you can do with the contras that hasn't already been done a million times in other military/science fiction flicks.

Of course, if you just wanted lots of mindless carnage and mayhem, I guess you could always do a Duke Nukem movie... or a movie about one of my old favorite NES games, NARC, for which the movie poster would read: "Just say 'no'... or else!"

rebel_1812

Quote from: Inyarear on July 05, 2007, 01:40:35 AM
Quote from: rebel_1812 on June 23, 2007, 09:41:28 PMI was thinking about this question the other day.  Crono Trigger would make a good movie if you wanted a dramatic story with good characters.  A movie based on the Contra series would make a good action film.

Chrono Trigger was an excellent RPG and the story was every bit as good as you say, but the problem with adapting any RPG into a movie is that these RPGs are just too open-ended and lengthy to fit into a movie format. Time constraints mean you have to follow just one storyline and leave a lot of stuff out, and if you do that, the players howl and the non-players don't understand what the heck is going on.


the same thing is said about every movie made from a book.  The book is always more indepth and covers more plot then the movie made from it.  Yet some very good movies have been made from books, for example Clockwork Orange.  I think it is possible to translate an RPG storyline to the silver screen without losing too much.
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Inyarear

Quote from: rebel_1812 on July 06, 2007, 03:35:40 PM
Quote from: Inyarear on July 05, 2007, 01:40:35 AM
Quote from: rebel_1812 on June 23, 2007, 09:41:28 PMI was thinking about this question the other day.  Crono Trigger would make a good movie if you wanted a dramatic story with good characters.  A movie based on the Contra series would make a good action film.

Chrono Trigger was an excellent RPG and the story was every bit as good as you say, but the problem with adapting any RPG into a movie is that these RPGs are just too open-ended and lengthy to fit into a movie format. Time constraints mean you have to follow just one storyline and leave a lot of stuff out, and if you do that, the players howl and the non-players don't understand what the heck is going on.

the same thing is said about every movie made from a book.  The book is always more indepth and covers more plot then the movie made from it.  Yet some very good movies have been made from books, for example Clockwork Orange.  I think it is possible to translate an RPG storyline to the silver screen without losing too much.

Well yeah, but have you noticed that most of the successful adaptations came from short books? Stanley Kubrick changed maybe three or four minor elements from the American version of Anthony Burgess' novel to make his film; the entire remainder of the story is there.

RPGs run for hours and hours, and it's frightening to think how badly you'd have to slice and dice their plots to make them fit in a two-hour slot. Maybe if video game movies catch on we'll get to see a high-budget four-hour marathon of a movie made from a video game, but there has to be some success with a shorter video game adaptation first. That's why I favor video games with a minimal story for adaptation: you can make up lots of stuff to cover all the gaps between the canonical parts, and as long as it's believably consistent with the source material, you've got yourself a film players and non-players alike can enjoy. If there's no story at all, there's nothing to adapt, but if there's too much story, there's too much to adapt. See how this works?

By the way, I just thought of another game that would be easy to adapt into a low-budget action flick because its story is so minimal: Rolling Thunder. There are several versions of the game, but all of them involve a hot shot pumping an extraterrestrial villain and his hooded KKK-resembling minions full of lead in order to save a damsel in distress who's actually a gun-toting tough gal herself. (She's just down on her luck; in the sequel, she's out there blowing away the bad guys right next to the tough guy from the first game.) There's more story in the synopsis from the manual than there is up on the screen. Mostly, the stuff on the screen consists of pictures of the gal being "distressed" in various ways (being chained up, hung up crucifixion-style, given full-body shock therapy, etc.). It's fast-moving, it's got a weird scenario, lots of gunplay, a hot chick, and a hot-shot guy who somehow manages to look good in a red shirt and long white pants. What more do you need?

JPickettIII



[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGg44e3zTWc

I did not see this yet, I would love to see Metal Gear made into movie.
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