Hollywood's Bad Influence

GameSpot's Jeff Gerstmann Criticizes Video Games For Going All Hollywood On Us

(CBS) 
William: They care more about the synchronicity of the product, not the actual quality of the product.

Jeff: Yeah, definitely. And it's become a running gag because it's kind of in the status quo with video games ever since back in the old Nintendo days it was just kind of a given that games based on movies or other licensed properties often…suck.

William: Especially if you think about…well, "The Crow" is my favorite. The video game version of "The Crow" is definitely my favorite piece of evidence for suckitude.

Jeff: "The Crow" on the Playstation was broken. Just broken. Oh, man.

William: I remember when the Super Mario Brothers movie came out, Hollywood took a video game and they just, it was a licensed thing, but they went so off track. Not as though there was a lot of plot to the original Mario Brothers, but…

Jeff: I think that that's part of the problem there. You have moviemakers trying to turn these paper-thin plots into 90-minute movies and they have to take so many liberties with it that anyone who's a fan of the game is just going to watch it and go, 'King Koopa's a dragon, not Dennis Hopper, what the hell is that?'

So they have to stray so far from the blueprint to make it make sense to the general movie-going audience that it's the same type of deal. They're not making a movie good enough for general movie fans to enjoy and they're certainly not satisfying fans of the game either.

William: Now, the Fantastic Four has done well, even though it was sort of a mediocre game. For some reason everybody seems to be buying it, and I guess the general feeling is 'It's OK', so we'll buy it anyway. Is there a lower set of standards now?

Jeff: Fantastic Four came out in the middle of the summer, which is a very weak season for game releases. Typically, everything is bunched up around the ends of every quarter because they're trying to rush stuff out for financial purposes and then, of course, the holiday season. So you kind of hit this patch when the weather gets warm, there are just no games until Madden comes out in August and the first week of September, or where we're at right now, everything starts coming out all at once.

William: So gamers were just hungry for something.

Jeff: Pretty much.

William: They just needed a game, they didn't need it to be "Fantastic".

Oh, I slay me.

Jeff: [Hahas ensue]