![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The tenth Electric Challenge stage asks us to talk about our favorite adaptation of a video game.
That cuts the space of the available possibilities down significantly. Unless, that is, the thing you are thinking about is already a transmedia property or originates and has some amount of fandom in Japan.
Because outside of Japan, movies or television shows of games happen very rarely, and they tend not to be A-list productions (things like DOOM and Bloodrayne come to mind), and it is much more likely that you will have games of movies instead (which are also often less than A-list productions, and I'm not just thinking about E.T. here.)
If I were going solely on nostalgia value, because I am an adult of the appropriate age to have seen this in occasion, the Super Mario Brothers Super Show (where, we note, Mario is played by a professional wrestler turned comedy actor, Lou Albano) old certainly rank highly, mostly for the animation segments, rather than the live action ones that strung together a sitcom-like plot and few appearance of various guest stars. Mostly I was there for Harvey Atkin's King Koopa, as that's basically how I have imagined every incarnation of Bowser ever since, even though most of them haven't been voiced in game or otherwise. And then there are the Legend of Zelda segments, which made a bit of a catchphrase meme, "Well, excuuuuse me, Princess!" in addition to being a loose adaptation of the Nintendo Legend of Zelda games.
But that's not a favorite, just a trip down nostalgia lane. (And I never did see the movie called Super Mario Brothers that came out in the 1990s.) It would be the same thing if I were talking about Jaleel White's Sonic the Hedgehog cartoons as the Sega Genesis era came into prominence. Also enjoyable, but not necessarily a thing that would qualify for a favorite even with the nostalgia boost.
There have been a few different series about games, like ReBoot, or games that came after movies, like Enter the Matrix, but when it comes to adaptations of games, most of the available space is animated adaptations of games, whether as short series, or 26 (or more) episode shows.
And many of the ones I can think of in that regard are in the "MMO where people are trapped without the ability to log out" like the .hack franchise or elements like Sword Art Online. Or ask questions like "Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?" (Which is an actual title.) Most recently, I've been seeing a series that takes the idea of "a person has been reborn into an MMO of some sort and needs to find their way out using the skills of the class or monster class they've been locked into," which might make for an interesting game, if the game came first. (But a lot of these things are light novels first and then adapted into other things, instead of games first and then adapted back.)
I forget, actually, whether the first series of .hack games came before .hack//SIGN, and whether the second series of games precedes .hack//roots, but the thing about those is that the animation and the game, except for .hack//roots, aren't even about the same characters, so they're mostly not actually adaptations of each other, they're transmedia properties instead. Augh.
Lastly, it's actually difficult to condense the interactivity of games into an adaptation, because unless it's Clue, and they show you the random ending, or all of the endings, the character takes a single pathway through the game and makes particular choices, some of which you might agree with, some which you might not, and there's usually not any sort of "but wait, I wanna see the one where they took a different route!" feature possible. Because, one, filming that many alternate scenes would be recreating the game itself (and people were very meh on games that were essentially full-motion clips with decision trees, unless they had gotten the attention of the Congress as corrupting the youth, as Night Trap did), but also, two, that's a lot of additional footage to animate or shoot, and very little in television or film works on an extravagant budget to be able to do that kind of thing. So, no matter what decisions get made about the path the game is taking, there will be some fans that are not on board with that decision.
And then there are games like Dust that I would love to see get adapted, and they probably won't, or the Typing Chronicles games.
So, favorite adaptation of a video game, then. It's not going to be Pokémon, even though I have a soft spot for Team Rocket's least competent trio the older I get. I think I might have to cheat and say something like PAC-MAN 256, which is a game adaptation of a game. The grind on it is awful for the last achievement, but as an endless runner form of Pac-Man, it's really a quite good adaptation of the original game.
That cuts the space of the available possibilities down significantly. Unless, that is, the thing you are thinking about is already a transmedia property or originates and has some amount of fandom in Japan.
Because outside of Japan, movies or television shows of games happen very rarely, and they tend not to be A-list productions (things like DOOM and Bloodrayne come to mind), and it is much more likely that you will have games of movies instead (which are also often less than A-list productions, and I'm not just thinking about E.T. here.)
If I were going solely on nostalgia value, because I am an adult of the appropriate age to have seen this in occasion, the Super Mario Brothers Super Show (where, we note, Mario is played by a professional wrestler turned comedy actor, Lou Albano) old certainly rank highly, mostly for the animation segments, rather than the live action ones that strung together a sitcom-like plot and few appearance of various guest stars. Mostly I was there for Harvey Atkin's King Koopa, as that's basically how I have imagined every incarnation of Bowser ever since, even though most of them haven't been voiced in game or otherwise. And then there are the Legend of Zelda segments, which made a bit of a catchphrase meme, "Well, excuuuuse me, Princess!" in addition to being a loose adaptation of the Nintendo Legend of Zelda games.
But that's not a favorite, just a trip down nostalgia lane. (And I never did see the movie called Super Mario Brothers that came out in the 1990s.) It would be the same thing if I were talking about Jaleel White's Sonic the Hedgehog cartoons as the Sega Genesis era came into prominence. Also enjoyable, but not necessarily a thing that would qualify for a favorite even with the nostalgia boost.
There have been a few different series about games, like ReBoot, or games that came after movies, like Enter the Matrix, but when it comes to adaptations of games, most of the available space is animated adaptations of games, whether as short series, or 26 (or more) episode shows.
And many of the ones I can think of in that regard are in the "MMO where people are trapped without the ability to log out" like the .hack franchise or elements like Sword Art Online. Or ask questions like "Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?" (Which is an actual title.) Most recently, I've been seeing a series that takes the idea of "a person has been reborn into an MMO of some sort and needs to find their way out using the skills of the class or monster class they've been locked into," which might make for an interesting game, if the game came first. (But a lot of these things are light novels first and then adapted into other things, instead of games first and then adapted back.)
I forget, actually, whether the first series of .hack games came before .hack//SIGN, and whether the second series of games precedes .hack//roots, but the thing about those is that the animation and the game, except for .hack//roots, aren't even about the same characters, so they're mostly not actually adaptations of each other, they're transmedia properties instead. Augh.
Lastly, it's actually difficult to condense the interactivity of games into an adaptation, because unless it's Clue, and they show you the random ending, or all of the endings, the character takes a single pathway through the game and makes particular choices, some of which you might agree with, some which you might not, and there's usually not any sort of "but wait, I wanna see the one where they took a different route!" feature possible. Because, one, filming that many alternate scenes would be recreating the game itself (and people were very meh on games that were essentially full-motion clips with decision trees, unless they had gotten the attention of the Congress as corrupting the youth, as Night Trap did), but also, two, that's a lot of additional footage to animate or shoot, and very little in television or film works on an extravagant budget to be able to do that kind of thing. So, no matter what decisions get made about the path the game is taking, there will be some fans that are not on board with that decision.
And then there are games like Dust that I would love to see get adapted, and they probably won't, or the Typing Chronicles games.
So, favorite adaptation of a video game, then. It's not going to be Pokémon, even though I have a soft spot for Team Rocket's least competent trio the older I get. I think I might have to cheat and say something like PAC-MAN 256, which is a game adaptation of a game. The grind on it is awful for the last achievement, but as an endless runner form of Pac-Man, it's really a quite good adaptation of the original game.
