Aladdin on the Mega Drive was not only a good (and very pretty) game, but if nothing else it helped make the programmer David Perry (not to be confused with the one from Gamesmaster) sucessful enough that he could start Shiny Entertainment and give us Earthworm Jim. Yay!

Spider-Man 2 didn’t have a very good main story mode, but its recreation of New York was excellent and it had a brilliant webslinging system.

Star Wars Trilogy Arcade and Episode 1 Racer were good too (though I imagine the home conversions of the latter lost a lot of the arcade machine’s appeal).

Also, I haven’t played it but the Blade-Runner point-and-click adventure was well-received.

Spider-Man 2 didn’t have a very good main story mode, but its recreation of New York was excellent and it had a brilliant webslinging system.

Yeah, the console version of S-M2 is absolutely brilliant. I’ve never actually completed the story, but I’ve spent hours just having fun swinging round New York, jumping off the Empire State building and beating up muggers.

Watch out for the PC version, though, it’s an incredibly simplistic and childlike game! Still good fun, but the webslinging is dumbed down, it doesn’t recreate New York the way the console version does, and it’s ludicrously easy.

Episode 1 Racer were good too (though I imagine the home conversions of the latter lost a lot of the arcade machine’s appeal)

Oh, and yes, God, I’ve spent SO much money on Episode 1 Racer machines. Brilliant, brilliant control system, and so much fun to play - but yeah, I can’t imagine it being anything like as entertaining on consoles!

By all accounts the upcoming Ghostbusters game is going to kick major ass. (And, in fact, I remember a really good PC Ghostbusters game from years ago in which your man was stationary and you used the mouse to control the proton stream, but nobody else seems to recall that.)

A little late to be considered a “tie-in” though.

Yeah, that’s more Ghosbusters 3!

There were quite a lot of good games based on films in the 1980s (Ocean’s “Batman the Movie” and “Robocop” being cases in point) but they lost their way somewhat in the 1990s (with the possible exception of Titus’s brilliant take on “The Blues Brothers”) and have now become a byword for “shite”.

Spider-Man 2 didn’t have a very good main story mode, but its recreation of New York was excellent and it had a brilliant webslinging system.

That’s the problem - “Spiderman 2” is essentially a brilliant game engine attached to a mediocre game. The recreation of New York and the webswinging is brilliant but the actual missions are a bit poor and, dammit, Spidey is just too nice! It’s no “Grand Theft Auto”.

I find it hilarious how Spidey continues his long, dull monologues as you’re swinging around New York and jumping off shit.

As for good games based on films from the ’80s, I also have to throw in:

“The Untouchables” (Ocean, 1989) - very hard but varied and slickly done.

“Cobra” (Ocean, 1986) - The film is apparently terrible but ZX Spectrum programmer Jonathan Smith (who occasionally posts on NOTBBC as “Frobrush” for those here who frequent that site) apparently decided to write a game only loosely based on the film and filled with with rubber ducks and enemy prams. I should point out that the Speccy version is the only good one - the C64 and Amstrad CPC versions are completely different and also pants.

“Star Wars”/”Empire Strikes Back” (Arcades, early ’80s)- Two extremely-good vector-based highscore games for the arcade that were converted (rather well) to a wide range of computers.

“Alien” (Mindgames, 1984) - early effort for the ZX Spectrum where the player controls the various crew of the Nostromo in an attempt to find and kill the alien and/or escape. This has weird controls but it’s very well done (it randomises who the android is and who the alien “explodes” from each game thus adding to the tension) and when the alien appears it can still shit you up.

“Aliens” (Electric Dreams, 1986) - Based on the sequel to the above. The player controls most of the characters from the film as they wander through the base on LV-26 with the action being first person (albeit in a way that 8-bit machines could manage). Difficult and surprisingly tense and scary when you encounter one of our knobbly-headed friends.

That’s about it, really. There were a lot of real stinkers of film-based games published in the “golden age” of home computing as well: the disappointing “Ghostbusters” for example or Ocean’s irritating “Platoon” (weirdly well-received at the time) not to mention the inexcusably-boring video game of “Big Trouble in Little China”.

> “The Untouchables” (Ocean, 1989) - very hard but varied and slickly done.

Oh, God, yes - this. I gave hours to that bloody game on the Spectrum!

I did think Everything Or Nothing was a very good Bond game, despite having no film source. The Buffy games made a good stab (ahem) at things). And the Scarface ‘alter-sequel’ game, though a GTA-wannbe, was a lot of fun.

Oh, and Jackson’s King Kong. Better than the film - had a proper vibe of its own. Let down only by the pointless ‘play as the ape’ stuff.

But…these are ‘not bad at all’ games, rather than great ones.

The answer is INDIANA JONES (TWICE!!) FTW.

Interesting:

http://chud.com/articles/articles/15716/1/SDCC08-Z…

‘When sitting down with Zack Snyder yesterday we got a pretty incredible answer as to what at least one of the games would about: “Woodward and Bernstein are in New York lecturing and the Comedian assassinates them,” Snyder said.

Snyder himself wrote the story for the game in an attempt to rescue it from the suits. “What they were doing I thought was crazy, and I couldn’t stop it, so I said let us do it,” he said. “The first thing I said is that it can’t have anything to do with the book. There can’t be any sequences from it, but there can be ideas.”’

the watchmen movie looks really cool, i cant wait to see the powers of all these superheroes. The video game is going to be sweet too. i cant see how the one for the Wii will be awesome, using the wond for certain things will be interesting.

> i cant wait to see the powers of all these superheroes

All one of them?