Twitch-O-Meter: The Console Incarnate

E.T. (Atari 2600) – Atari acquired the rights to produce a tie-in game for around $20 million, setting a deadline of five weeks for it to be developed end-to-end. Titles at that time generally spent three to six months-plus gestating, but because negotiations for the film’s rights drug on the abbreviated schedule was needed for the game to ship by the holidays. The end result was an almost-unplayable, buggy mess based around the worst sorts of repetitive scenarios (games which understood the 2600’s limitations knew how to exploit them; this wasn’t one them). In digging up my copy I spent all of 15 minutes with it before giving up in frustration; that being said, it was probably the longest I had ever played it. As they spiraled into bankruptcy, Atari began dumping unsold materials in a private landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. It’s widely thought (due in part to reports from Alamogordo’s newspaper) many millions of unsold E.T. cartridges made up a hefty portion of the materials deposited, crushed, and eventually paved over.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Atari 2600) – Erstwhile Full Moon impresario Charles Band was once in the video game biz (via his great Wizard Video label, they of oversized VHS cases and painted cover art), releasing an incarnation of perhaps the most hallowed of American horror films. TCM allowed the gamer to play as Leatherface, chasing after potential victims with a blocky chainsaw. With nary a thought toward game play or artistic merit, thematic elements from the film were hijacked and whittled down to what many would consider representations of the genre at its worst – simple-minded stalk-n-slash violence offered up for vicarious thrill-seekers. Considering TCM stands as one of, if not the first “horror” gaming titles, its general failures are all the more damning. A poorly produced cash-in on Wizard’s home video license of the film, the game quickly disappeared from shelves (if it was ever even on them – many retailers kept it hidden from impressionable young customers).

*(let it be said I take nothing away from Charles Band – to survive in the business as long as he has, he’s obviously a smart man who’s done more than a few things right; plus Wizard Video still kicks all kinds of ass)

Platoon (Nintendo Entertainment System) – To me – and maybe this is just me – Oliver Stone’s catalog of work wouldn’t seem the most ripe for translation. There’s a reason the Salvadors and Talk Radios and JFKs of the world never made it to the game environment – not that they aren’t great films worthy of interpretation and evaluation by new audiences, but rather they don’t deal in concepts which can be easily distilled down. That isn’t to say video games can’t be forums for examining serious ideas, but it seems console games simply hadn’t evolved to a point where issues like those addressed in Stone’s film could’ve been given necessary weight. What was left in this case was a sub-par side-scrolling shooter with typically bad NES-era AI and a confusing maze aspect built into its gameplay. There seems to be some good will toward this title out there, but after a few rounds I couldn’t stomach it. Platoon reps an inappropriate adaptation on all fronts.

The Lawnmower Man (Super Nintendo / Sega Genesis & CD / Nintendo Gameboy) – No fun anecdotes about a basin of crushed carts somewhere in the American southwest, no references to ass-kicking ‘80s VHS releases, nothing – just a bad movie translated into a bad game. I’ve only had the misfortune of playing the Gameboy version, which might skew things further into the negative, but a side-scrolling shooter based on a film about radical VR therapy turning a man with a mental handicap into some sort of cyber-god makes about as much sense as, well, a film about radical VR therapy turning a man with a mental handicap into some sort of cyber-god. Brett Leonard’s film at least stood as goofy fun with a CG sheen that, at the time, was a little mind-blowing. This Man blew on a more base level.

Street Fighter: The Movie (the game) (Sega Saturn) – My head hurts just from having written that. Do we really have room in this world for a video game turned into a movie turned back into a video game? Maybe, if only the game wasn’t an achingly inferior addition to a storied series; it goes without saying this is not the case here. I’m something of a Van Damme apologist, still getting a gas from his current DTV work and proudly cramming copies of Hard Target and the like on my increasingly cluttered DVD shelves. His Street Fighter, though, was just a turd and in the case of its game adaptation, scat begat scat. Beyond familiar character names and basic mechanics, the similarities between this and its forebears ended. Poorly-realized video captures of the actors as their respective characters coupled with buggy play and a general lack of reason for being pretty much crushed any hope this title had of riding its good name to glory. On a console rife with lost classics, Street Fighter should probably just stay lost.

What about everyone else? Any hated adaptations or perceived missed opportunities out there to discuss?