by David Rasmussen

Created on: April 18, 2009

What? There's actually a pro to banging out video games based on movie (or TV Series, celebrities like the Dog Whisperer or Jamie Oliver, and cultural fasicinations like pet raising sims or the street racing craze)? NO! You don't say!

However, believe it or not, there are actually a few pros to the concept of the ever dreaded and cursed movie to game translation other than, say, your bottom line growing fatter if you happen to be a major investor in the game company or movie/TV production house that the game is based... or not growing fatter because the people making the game can't equate the simplest piece of divine logic to the creation of the game... and damn me for paraphrasing, of all things, a Kevin Costner movie.

"If you build it (RIGHT!), they will come."

Field of Dreams (a Kevin Costner movie)

That's about it, by the ways, for the con side of things. I mean how hard can it be to do the math.

Good game (that doesn't suck) + talent from movie/TV Series (more on that in a sec) + audience = money.

Apparently math was never the forte of the people making bad movie to game translations (all 80 to 90% of them) because they apparently can't see the collation between quick slapshod shovelware gaming + poor voice talent - audience who won't waste their precious money on inferior product = NO MONEY. I mean, come on, we know we're not wasting hard earned cash on (bleep) (I don't care who is in the game doing the voices if it's shovelware it's shovelware regardless of whether the stars of the movie could find the time (or find the studio to record the voices for the game) to be in said game.

Anyway con(s) as in more than one con? I don't know, how many times can I say "Con : Wasted money on sucky game"? I didn't read the other pieces, but personally I don't imagine there's much else to say about the downside of poorly slapped together junk. You lose money, you lose respect for the people who made the movie and the game, become bitter and wary about ever spending money on movie/TV based games because you've been burned one too many times. They lose money (never make back what they poured into the title to make it go), they lose respect (unless they were a third party game developer then they didn't have much respect to lose)... at this point I'd like to say somebody learned a lesson but as you've seen some companies make it their life's journey to get every movie/TV to game translation and murder said translation with cheap quickly rushed game mechanics, bad voice acting

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