In this weeks games clubs we thought we would take a look at the upcoming Walking Dead game by Overkill but as we thought more and more we noticed an alarming trend of shameless cash grabs tying games into TV and Film franchises over the years… and as we love to shit on bad games we thought we would take a deeper look at some of the worst offenders of Shameless game tie ins!
Ben
I am going to get hate from this but fuck it… .. This game, while it is a remaster from the original game, features cut scenes from the film that was released around the same time. This also means that the remaster isn’t a remaster, its a remake. A remaster is something that has the exact same game play as the original game, if anything gets added to the game then it immediately gets transitioned into a reeeemake. Admittedly I did’t play the game myself, but I had watched plenty of videos of it online. The one thing that kept coming up was that the game couldn’t be effectively recorded because there where cut scenes in the game that where straight out of the film, so to stop film piracy, the developers places a capture card recording ban on those sections. There must be a joke in there somewhere about copyright… Right?
Clarissa
Okay Okay, I appreciate that i’m probably not the right demographic for this game, but my pick is Frozen: Olaf’s Quest for the DS and 3DS. This game was very clearly a money spin, by using the most popular Character and plugging him into the easiest platformer I have ever seen, I am sure they spun a pretty penny. This game is barely more than a mobile game whilst I appreciate that its aimed at young children, I lent this to my Frozen obsessed 7 year old cousin over Christmas and it took her near 3 hours total to 100% the game. From some retailers this game still sells new at £30, that’s £10 an hour and the game really doesn’t lend itself to a replay. That’s some expensive entertainment.
P.S Happy Birthday to me in 3 days time!
Chris
I’ve shied away from most movie tie-in games because they’ve always looked half baked. My most memorable encounter with them is my friend, Zach, bringing a cheap copy of Thor: God of Thunder for the Xbox 360 over to play. Looked awful, and seemed to play awful, too. The gameplay was lazy and repetitive, and the entire game had like three enemies in it; it seemed like every level, whether you were fighting frost giants or some reskin of them, you were just going through the motions to move onto the next part of wide, empty space. God of War quick time events to beat big baddies, and the only level that changed this up was a very long raft ride where you were attacked by lizardmen. Hooray.
I don’t get it. Why do some companies half-ass a game like that? Yeah, you have constraints on what you can do plot wise, that’s fair enough, but you can always try to do something unexpected with the gameplay. Experiment, explore – try to make the next Arkham series, another out-of-nowhere bit of innovation – or heck, even something just fun and memorable like the old Hulk or Spiderman titles on PS2. Your developers would enjoy making it, fans would actually like it, and it’d sell more, too.
Javier
The first thing that popped into my head were mobile games, and specifically Marvel’s legion of mobile games. These are fine for mobile games, sure, but i can’t help but feel that it’s taken focus away from console game development (luckily salvaged this year by spidey). You think we used to get those top down coop game such as ultimate alliance on the regular, coupled with movie tie ins (not all good) and random side scrollers there was a whole heap to enjoy. Now they console games are few and far between and the mobile games are all very similar. I hope that the rumours of spidey kicking off a marvel gaming universe are true and we get some real crackers in the coming years.
Gotta say most of the sega MCU tie in games were shit. Remember back on the PS2 when every other game was a movie tie in game, but was perfectly acceptable. ahh…
