There are a few things that every serious gamer knows: Bad guys always carry loose change, guns bob and spin in midair, and any game based on a movie is going to be terrible. Even movies that are practically video games already, like Iron Man, make for terrible games, though lucrative ones.

But amidst the sea of mediocrity, there’s a few movie-based games that not only lived up to their forebearers, they might have even surpassed them.

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay

Vin Diesel may not look like a nerd, but he’s probably a bigger one than you are.

The dude plays Dungeons and Dragons. The name of his Drow witch hunter was tattooed on his body in xXx. He even wrote the preface for the special edition D&D player’s handbook. (He’s also been rumored to be a World of Warcraft player, but that hasn’t been confirmed as far as I can tell.)

Maybe Diesel’s involvement is why The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay was one of the better action games of the last console generation. Or maybe not, since the actual “Chronicles of Riddick” movie he starred in was a big sci-fi mess.

Regardless, Butcher Bay is a prequel to the first appearance of the character in the cult hit movie Pitch Black. You play Riddick, busting your way out of prison and along the way getting your eyes “shined” so you can see in the dark.

It was one of the first games to use normal mapping techniques, now common and sometimes overused, to give the prison interiors a sense of texture. It’s also one of the few first person shooter games to have a satisfying, weighty-feeling melee system and a decent way of doing stealth and sneaking.

If you missed Butcher Bay the first time around, you’ll get a chance to see it again. Atari is releasing The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena as a current-gen remake of the first game with twice as much story.

GoldenEye 007

The James Bond movie on which GoldenEye 007 was based is good, make no mistake. The Nintendo 64 game, however, was better than good. It practically defined first person shooters on the console side, long overshadowed by their PC bretheren.

GoldenEye sported impressively sharp visuals and animations for its time. They were put to good use in the single-player campaign that loosely followed the movie, but the split-screen multiplayer was where the action was.

Pretty much everyone how had a Nintendo 64 has some memories of grabbing three friends, firing up GoldenEye, and turning on some insane game mode like “all proximity mines.” The amount of player customization available in that game paved the way for Halo 3′s Forge mode.

There have been quite a few Bond games since then trying to recapture the GoldenEye magic, but nobody has quite reproduced Rare’s touch. Timesplitters has no movie to its name, but it did a pretty good job of being a spiritual sequel nonetheless.

Lego Star Wars

Star Wars is an unusual property in that most of the games that have come out bearing its name have actually been pretty good.

The X-Wing and Tie Fighter games were landmarks of the space sim genre. The Jedi Knight games seamlessly blended first person shooters with the iconic lightsabers. The Knights of the Old Republic RPG gave the fictional universe a much-needed shot of originality. And hey, don’t even get me started on that old vector-art arcade cabinet where you made an attack run on the Death Star.

I’m giving the first Lego Star Wars game a special mention, however, because it does the impossible. It makes the episode 1-3 prequels awesome.

Don’t believe me? Here’s the cutscene for Padme giving birth to Anakin’s children, Luke and Leia.

Lego Padme: Puff puff puff
*pop* *pop*
(A side character holding two little crying Lego heads on single blocks.)
(Lego Padme’s eyes turn to X’s, dies.)

If Episode 3 had actually been that way, it would have been a hundred times better.

Lego Star Wars isn’t a difficult game. You pretty much start wherever you died with no penalty. The intended audience is very young kids, after all. Despite that, it’s got an oddly grind-tastic mentality that encourages you to play the same levels over and over to unlock everything. Still, it works well as a light rental.

Next time on Kwanzoo, good game-based movies. (Spoiler: There aren’t any.)

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