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[Kevin]

I'm not sure if this is the right place for this, but it's something I've been thinking about lately (I don't have a job, give me a break).

Bad movie games are hilarious to me. Not just because they're often poor playing, ill designed and obviously intended as quick cash-ins on popular licenses, but because more often than not they bear little to no resemblance to that on which they're based, making drastic changes to plot, characters, setting, etc. to better suit their respective licenses to video game format. I'm thinking of titles like Jurassic Park for the Genesis (when, in the movie, did Dr. Grant go all Rambo on a triceratops with a machine gun in the jungle?) or, more recently, Fight Club for the PS2/Xbox/&c., which ended up being, from what I understand, little more than a sub-par brawler.

More specifically, what I've been thinking about is making games that capitalize on this kind of thing. Taking public domain (to avoid copyright issues) characters, stories, films, and the like, and making games that intentionally miss the point. Hopefully, hilarity will ensue. I didn't want to start a mockup therad, because I don't want to detract from the other mockup-centerd threads. A game-idea-dump thread already exists, too. I'd love to see this as a competition, but I don't have the time or organizational skills for anything like that. So, instead, I open this thread, which hopefully will encompass all of these things. Make mockups, share ideas, post games, concept art, whatever you want to produce in relation to this topic. Maybe this isn't an idea worth pursuing, but I think it could lead to some pretty awesome, funny stuff.

I'll start things off with an idea that seemed better to me at the time than it does now: A Modest Proposal: The Game, in which you, as Jonathan Swift, must eat as many babies as possible before the country is overrun. Do well, and solve both the economic and population crises and, ultimately, have a statue erected in your honour.

Actually, this is kind of a bad example, because it doesn't... it sticks to close to the original text. Better would be something like a Lord of the rings platformer where Frodo fights wave after wave of orc on his way to mount doom, where he takes on Sauroun in a one on one battle to the death, interspersed with shmup levels where Gandalf throws fireballs at black riders (hundreds of them) from the back of a giant eagle. 'Cept lord of the rings isn't public domain. Actually, scratch the public domain bit, too. All's fair game in the name of parody, right?

[moi]

This lord of the ring game sounds actually cool

[swordofkings128]

i've always wanted to make a game based off the Last Dragon!

[Paint by Numbers]

This lord of the ring game sounds actually cool

Agreed, I want somebody to make this.

I can't think of any proper ideas, but - reversing the theme - a Cave Story movie in which:
- the Mimigas are stupid rabbits
- Curly is a scantily-clad human damsel-in-distress to be rescued by
- a cyborg Quote (versus a robot Quote)
...would not need to be made.

[Bree]

Coming soon: Michael Bay's CAVE STORY

Starring Meagan Fox as Curly

and Shia Lebeouf as Quote

[Kevin]

And then someone can make "Cave story: The game: The movie: The Official Game of the Movie" which a bunch of superfluous side missions unrelated to anything seen in the movie, like finding Curly's panties (oh, wait...)

[Martin 2BAM]

Something like this?

[JosephCh]

That title is just wonderful!

[Kevin]

it would have been more elaborate but it started to feel like to much effort for a joke.

I wonder if I wanna be the guy: the movie could achieve a high enough level of masochism to do it's namesake justice.

[Bree]

In order for the movie to be true to the namesake, it would have to be as painfully unfair to its audience. Set up an intricate plot, filled with memorable characters, and then, suddenly, rocks fall, everyone dies a horrible, painful death, and a million plot threads go unresolved. And then it starts all over again.

[Alec S.]

Jean-Paul Sartre:  The Game

[soundofsatellites]

Coming soon: Michael Bay's CAVE STORY
Starring Meagan Fox as Curly
and Shia Lebeouf as Quote

Oh! cool, and then we can forgive them for murdering our childhood memories with that transformers movies!

Also: -> everybody knows christian bale was born to play quote

[William Broom]

Kevin, have you played Arm Joe? If not, look it up, it's good stuff.

Me, I would go for a game of Moby Dick which is basically the first level of God of War, fifteen times over. Plus, Ahab has a scythe blade that comes out of his peg leg.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Jean-Paul Sartre:  The Game

i dunno, he had a pretty exciting life

In 1939 Sartre was drafted into the French army, where he served as a meteorologist.[10] He was captured by German troops in 1940 in Padoux,[11] and he spent nine months as a prisoner of war — in Nancy and finally in Stalag 12D, Trier, where he wrote his first theatrical piece, Barionà, fils du tonnerre, a drama concerning Christmas. It was during this period of confinement that Sartre read Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, later to become a major influence on his own essay on phenomenological ontology. Due to poor health (he claimed that his poor eyesight affected his balance) Sartre was released in April 1941. Given civilian status, he recovered his position as a teacher at Lycée Pasteur near Paris, settled at the Hotel Mistral near Montparnasse at Paris, and was given a new position at Lycée Condorcet, replacing a Jewish teacher who had been forbidden to teach by Vichy law.

After coming back to Paris in May 1941, he participated in the founding of the underground group Socialisme et Liberté with other writers Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Toussaint, Dominique Desanti, Jean Kanapa, and École Normale students. In August, Sartre and Beauvoir went to the French Riviera seeking the support of André Gide and André Malraux. However, both Gide and Malraux were undecided, and this may have been the cause of Sartre's disappointment and discouragement. Socialisme et liberté soon dissolved and Sartre decided to write, instead of being involved in active resistance. He then wrote Being and Nothingness, The Flies, and No Exit, none of which were censored by the Germans, and also contributed to both legal and illegal literary magazines.

After August 1944 and the Liberation of Paris, he wrote Anti-Semite and Jew. In the book he tries to explain the etiology of hate by analyzing antisemitic hate. Sartre was a very active contributor to Combat, a newspaper created during the clandestine period by Albert Camus, a philosopher and author who held similar beliefs. Sartre and Beauvoir remained friends with Camus until he turned away from communism, a schism that eventually divided them in 1951, after the publication of Camus' The Rebel. Later, while Sartre was labelled by some authors as a resistant, the French philosopher and resistant Vladimir Jankelevitch criticized Sartre's lack of political commitment during the German occupation, and interpreted his further struggles for liberty as an attempt to redeem himself. According to Camus, Sartre was a writer who resisted, not a resistor who wrote.

When the war ended Sartre established Les Temps Modernes (Modern Times), a monthly literary and political review, and started writing full-time as well as continuing his political activism. He would draw on his war experiences for his great trilogy of novels, Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom) (1945–1949).

i think that'd make a pretty neat game

[Alec S.]

Yeah, I take it back, that would make an awesome game.

[Hempuli‽]

Kevin, that pic is wonderful!

I really like the idea, though there's a huge difference in humor value when it's not about real actors but pixel characters.

A very funny example of this is the Home Alone game for SNES


How to turn a game where the main character doesn't get hurt in any way to an interesting platformer? Let's add old ladies and jumping golf bags!

[Kevin]

haha, I vaguely remember the Home Alone games and yeah, they're a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Does Macaulay Culkin have a pistol? If he does (which I'm assuming he doesn't) that's fantastic. The idea that the kid from Home Alone is about to shoot a man in cold blood is beyond hilarious to me (maybe that's an exaggeration, but it's still pretty damned hilarious).

there's a huge difference in humor value when it's not about real actors but pixel characters.

I think I see what you're saying, but I'm a bit confused. Do you mean this kind of ridiculousness is funnier if acted out by real people as opposed to in games? Like, a horrible film rendition of Moby Dick starring scythe-leg-Ahab would be funnier than a horrible game? If so, I agree completely. People tend to be more accepting of this kind of ridiculousness in games (as questionable plots seem often to be forgiven in the name of fun, engaging gameplay), but to me there's something uniquely charming and funny about it. Take the following quote from Wikipedia which, for the sake of my argument, I'm hoping is accurate:

The purpose of the game is to escape the Wet Bandits while bringing all the McCallister's fortunes from the house down to the safe room in the basement. Once all items have been sent down the chute to the basement Kevin must make it past rats, bats, and ghosts he encounters in the basement then fight the spider king so he can make it to the safe room to lock away all his families riches.

It's pretty obvious to that these additions were made in an effort to "game-up" a decidedly un-gamey license, and the thought of this stuff in the context of the original movie is just... wow. If a ghost and a giant spider had shown up half way through the movie... brilliant.