• Best game->film adaptation is still
Mortal Kombat. It's not
good exactly, but it's watchable as heck (in a "Big Trouble in Little China" sort of way), and keeps the spirit of the games without being slavish to it. Fan service done right. Also that
techno dance soundtrack and
titular song was huge when the movie came out. The less said about the
sequels, the better. Hey weird there's going to be a
reboot movie soon apparently?
• Best film->game adaptation? I'm not going to touch Star Wars, here, because that's like an entire mythology unto itself at this point and such a no-contest win that it's not even worth discussing. I think maybe
Alien vs Predator (2000) could be a contender, depending on how loose you're willing to be with the definition of "film adaptation" (there was no AvP movie at the time of the game's development, so it was aesthetically and conceptually an amalgamation of the Aliens movies and Predator movies). Anyway it's a great game and captures the essence of what those movie monsters, as well as each of their respective settings, was all about. And that includes the asymmetrical, delightfully unbalanced multiplayer modes as well. Uh, and even though it's much more based on the comics/novels, I want to give a shout-out to the
Alien vs Predator arcade game by Capcom, possibly the greatest belt-scroller beat-em-up of all time. I'd also argue that the original Aliens movie, for better and for worse, more or less established the template for all videogame characters and plots from that point forward, and the industry has only just begun to recover. Oh wait I don't have to make that argument because someone else already did it for me:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYtQmayyDLA
• Worst game->film adaptation is basically "all of them," but hey how about:
Aliens vs Predator? When AVP the movie finally came out, inspired by the numerous
comics,
games, and that one
easter-egg in the last scene of Predator 2, it was absolute unwatchable trash and a veritable new-years fireworks display of both straight-up bad ideas as well as wasted potential. The setting and the setup was decent, they tied it into the larger lore of both the films; even going so far as to cast Lance Henriksen as Charles Weyland, founder of Weyland-Yutani corp, aka "The Company" in Aliens which manufactured the "Bishop" android which was played by . . . Lance Henriksen. There's even a cute little throwaway scene where he's filling out paperwork at his desk and starts playing "the knife game" with his pen in a callback to the
famous scene in Aliens. It was essentially Fan Service: The Movie, and this is the key to its undoing as well as the reason it's simultaneously oozing with missed potential. Maybe not the objective worst game->film adaptation, but probably the most disappointing.
• Worst movie->game adaptation, from a historical perspective, has to be ET; a game so infamous it is in the popular consciousness widely blamed for causing the
Videogame Crash of 1983. There's even an entire
documentary film about the search for a legendary landfill of ET cartridges dumped in the aftermath of the crash.
But for my money the most notably bad movie->game adaptation is
Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game; if only because of the beautiful absurdity of its very existence. They took the actors from the (already bad) Street Fighter movie adaptation, and did the whole Mortal Kombat process of photographing them in various poses to build all the sprites for their characters, and naturally it looked terrible and played . . . well not irredeemably terrible, but much much worse than any of the other Street Fighter games, that's for sure.
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