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| Predator, Alien, Robocop, Hudson Hawk, Goonies, Batman, Back To The Future, Gremlins, Beverly Hills Cop, Addams Family, Ghostbusters, Running Man.... What links all of these movies? Its obvious really they have all had speccy games based on them Since right back in the early days of computing we have had movie tie ins, although the first ones were pretty unknown, it wasnt really until the smash hit GhostBusters movie was brought to the computer world that people really started to take notice. |
| Until this point it seemed like the major games companies hadnt realised that if they put the name of a hit movie onto their games that they would sell, well this soon changed and it seemed like every movie that was realeased had a game attached somewhere! In the early days these were mostly poor clones of other games of the era, for example the goonies was a basic rip off of any platform game such as Jet Set Willy, but the games did have their charm. Over the years these games got a bit more interesting, although not quite all of them met the grade! |
| Part of the problem in the early days was that no-one really knew what these machines were capable of, so they stuck with something tried and tested, which was fair enough but gamers wanted something new something exciting. Some of the comanies tried to provide something along these lines, such as the appaulingly bad Back to the future, which should have been a great game, but sadly no one ever took the time and effort to create what the fans wanted, and what we ended up with was an unplayable waste of space. Thats not to say that all movie conversions were bad, not by a long shot... |
| In the mid 80's Ocean became a very big company, mainly due to its use of movie conversions, these nearly all followed a similar style and were generally quite good. It wasnt until the release of 1989's Robocop where things really went crazy though, this game brought everything you could want from a game. I know im going to get stick from some of the elitest Spectrum fans, who think that Ocean ruined the Speccy, but personally i feel they brought a lot of clever ideas into the mix, which hadnt been done quite as well before them. |
| Around about the same time as the Robocop game their was also a big crazy for Batman, as the Movie was soon to be released, so again it was down to Ocean to provide us with some interactive batmanning! We had already had two spectrum games based on the caped hero, but it wasnt until Ocean brought the movie onto our computers that we really saw where they could go with such a liscence, and yet the game recieves a lot of critism to this day for being too similar to the Robocop game from before, |
| As the movies came out so did the games, with films like Total Recall and the Addams family obvious targets for the Ocean programmers to get busy with. And again there were another two fine games which although they didnt have a lot to do with the movies they had a sense of fun and they felt like they were pushing the speccy to its limits. Total Recall, based on the movie with Arnie Swartksjhdh, was as usual a platform based game, but really what else could it be, we hadnt invented thirdperson shooters by then (Thank God) basically platform shooters were all we could really handle, and Total Recall is one of the best, with its nice cartoon like graphics and interesting if extremely difficult levels, this was a step up for games. |
| Obviously we still got lots of complete turkeys but what was to be expected when some of the films were as bad as they were. One game that sticks out to me was Running Man, with a movie with such a clever idea, basically a game show where you must kill people, the computer game was absolutely rubbish, it was awaste of time, even Smash Tv which came out a little later was a better recreation of this film, and that had nothing to do with it! |
| A title that had nothing much to do with the movie but presented us with a nice game was Addams Family, this was loosely based on the movie, but basically it was a Mario style platform game, when the Spectrum wasnt supposed to be able to do console style platformers! Well obviously Ocean knew something we didnt cos they pulled it off, and it was a very clever, big game which kept a lot of us happy for a long time. |
| A lot of Spectrum Fanatics dismis a lot of the Ocean games as mere ripoffs, but personally i find they all bring a little something new into the mix and can quite easibly be played to this day. Movie conversions still follow a formula, back in the speccy days it tended to be Platform based, nowadays its first person shooters or Tomb Raider Clones, nothing much has changed but the more recent games tend to have forgotten to add that bit of sparkle that we knew when we started playing such games. |
| The games of yesteryear, such as Robocop and batman, whilst formulaic, still offered a fair bit of challenge, and some nice graphics, but more than that they offered some interesting gameplay, Okay games that didnt have movie licenses could offer great gameplay, but would they sell as well? The only real downside to all of this was that a lot of smaller companies just couldnt compete, where Ocean would keep a game in the top 10 for 2 years just because of its name, a smaller company like Cult couldnt even get a game in the top ten, which left a lot of great games unknown. |
| My Personal top movie tie ins would include... Robocop Robocop 2 Hudson Hawk Total Recall Batman Short Circuit Navy Seals On the other side of the coin, we have worst games... Back to the future 1 back to the future 2 back to the future 3 running man Friday the 13th Days of thunder |
| SPECTRUM MOVIE CONVERSIONS |