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7. Halo
Above: It seems the entire film is on YouTube for streaming legit. You might as well
8. Uncharted
The game is: The rollickingly fun Indiana-Jones-meets-Joss-Whedon adventure set on a mysterious jungle island, in which a cocky young explorer and a journalist engage in all kinds of platform-jumping, man-killing fun in the name of treasure and not being eaten by rampaging great goblin men.
The movie is: There is a mysterious tropical island. There is a young documentary crew doing some ill-fated exploring. There are monsters of some kind. The surface similarities scream “cynical cash-in” like a man being eaten by dogs screams “Hey dogs, get off”. But there’s one crucial difference between Uncharted the game and Uncharted the film. And that difference friends, is acting:
Above: ACTING!
9. Outland
The game is: A beautifully stylised Metroid-style platformer taking in an abstracted creation story by way of a gorgeous ambience and a natty Ikaruga-style weapon polarity system.
The movie is: A sci-fi western, with Sean Connery packing a shotgun on the moon of Io. Also, a beard.
Also also, exploding heads.
10. Battlefield
The game is: A series of best-in-genre online military shooters, lauded for their vast scale, tactical, class-driven gameplay, organically emergent cinematic set-pieces, and awful single player campaigns.
The movie is: A 2012 short exploring the issues of no-strings sex within the Australian gay community, detailing with “the emotional negotiation of a one-night stand between two men bound by habit and idiosyncrasy”. Probably contains tactics. May have emergent set-pieces. Presumably results in a disappointing single-player campaign of a different kind if negotiation fails. It's doing the festival circuit now, so there are no online clips, but the Facebook page is here.
11. Medal of Honor
The game is: Either Steven Spielberg’s celebrated World War II FPS from 1999 or the less celebrated modern-day reboot of the series from 2010. Both games pride themselves on military authenticity and respect for the men and women involved in real-life world conflict, both historical and modern.
The movie is: A touching and dryly funny Romanian film from 2009, about a 75-year-old war veteran (perhaps erroneously) receiving the Medal of Honor for actions in World War II which he cannot even remember.
Estranged from his son, and living with a wife who refuses to speak to him, he uses the new recognition to rebuild those relationships and regain his sense of pride, regardless of not being entirely sure of whether he really deserves the plaudit. An authentic, human treatment of war of a very different kind, but it looks really good and contains 100% less Linkin Park than the game. So that’s just great.
12. Portal
The game is: Valve's ground-breaking, mind-bending, brilliantly-paced and beautifully written spatial puzzler, teaser of further Half-Life narrative, and launcher of a thousand memes.
The movie is: A low-budget horror film about some people stuck in a motel in a fog, where time doesn’t move.
Alternately it’s (and I’m quoting the IMDB here), a two-minute CG film which “experiments with both the 3D environment it inhabits and the digital subconsciousness it suggests. The Portal is intended as an abstract gateway to the mind, body and soul elements of existence. Each of these are depicted by an arm on the Portal, each with it's own individual visual contribution of binary code and morphing texture maps”.
If all of that sounds like the most pretentious description you’ve ever heard for two minutes of animation, well yeah, your suspicions are not ill-founded. I’ve just watched it on the IMDB, and it’s wank. Pretty much a dull music video from that period in the early ‘90s when we were taking our first faltering steps into CG but doing absolutely sod-all with it. But it was made in 2006.
Although it does use Plaid on the soundtrack, and I can’t completely hate anything that does that.
