Samrat Sharma

Hollywood has a habit of taking good games and making totally crap movies out of them. Somebody in Hollywood thinks that gamers are stupid. Compounded by the fact that thousands of fanboys regularly lap up their drivel, this disturbing trend continues. And that is the reason most gamers do not want to see their favourite games as pointless movies. But a truly inspired movie, which expands the franchise, instead of just sewing together action sequences, is long overdue.
A game like Max Payne, though, would make a terrible movie. The thing is games have an edge over cinema, and that is interactivity. You interact with the environment and move the plot forward. The experience of playing games thus is far more engrossing than your average Friday night action movie. And it is precisely due to this reason that the stories in games are sometimes lacking when compared to cinema.
The raison de’tre for cinema is to tell stories. For games on the other hand story is just a piece that completes the whole, gameplay being the pivot. Other factors like atmosphere, sound and graphics do affect both mediums, but in games their balanced use is paramount.
So while for a game the story of Max Payne was pretty good and did engross you, thinking cinematically, it is just B movie pulp fiction stuff. There are games with strong plotlines (Deus Ex), or the setting and gameplay (Baldur’s Gate II), or even the franchise and the atmosphere (Hitman) just waiting to be made into good movies. But unless a gamer or a guy who respects games, and by extension the people who play those games, makes these movies, I am not getting excited about any game based movie that Hollywood churns out.