Movie licensed games have been around since the dawn of the Atari 2600 back in the ‘80s. Beginning somewhere around the popular E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial game and continuing on through the worlds of your Donkey Kongs, Resident Evils and what have you., the relationship between films and gaming have gone hand-in-hand for decades and will continue to do so. In Cinematech’s latest episode, "Cinematic Cinematech," we take a look at some of the most popular movie games to be released, both past and present. Inspired by this episode, we decided to poll some of the creative minds behind the shows to come up with the best and worse games inspired by movies… and movies inspired by games.  Enjoy!

tron


Top 5 Best Games Based on Movies:
Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic – The best Star Wars-inspired game in a looong time. Better than the last two movies, that’s for sure.
Spider-Man – The web crawler still impresses in the latest update in the franchise.
Any of the Lord of the Rings games from EA – They all simply kick ass. Nuff said.
The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay  – Oh my God, soooo much better than the movie!
Tron 2.0 – Did the world really need to see Tron updated in a new and improved game? You bet it did! Now, let’s hope they do an equally great job with the new remake of the movie.

Catwoman

Top 5 Worst Games Based on Movies:
E.T.: The Extraterrestrial – There was so much hype surrounding this game back in the day, that when it finally arrived and looked like crap and played like churning molasses, the angry mobs started forming quick!
Evil Dead: Hail to the King – How can such a gret movie franchise (the Evil Dead trilogy) make for such a lousy game? They even got Bruce Campbell to do the voice of Ash… yet it still sucked. Too bad.
Catwoman – Unlike the Chronicles of Riddick game, this poo-poo movie also inspired a poo-poo game. Even Halle Berry’s digital breasts can’t save this game.
Enter the Matrix – … and then exit it quickly!
Daredevil: The Man Without Fear – A game so bad they pulled it when the movie tanked.Good thing too, because if I had seen a digitized Ben Affleck, I might have killed myself. See our upcoming "Cancelled Games" epsiode for more of these gaming debacles.

Resident Evil 4

Top 5 Best Movies Based on Games:
Final Fantasy – Depends if you are a Final Fantasy fan or not… but if you are, you’ll love it.
Resident Evil – A surprisingly solid action-horror flick that really does capture the spirit of the game.
Mortal Kombat – So good in a such a bad way.
Tomb Raider – Some love it, some hate it, but Angelina Jolie is so smokin’ hot it makes the list anyway.
Tron – Not based on a game, but it’s about games and inspired so much….
Last Star Fighter – Same as above.

Super Mario DS


Top 5 Worst Movies Based on Games:
Super Mario Bros. – How did an actor of Bob Hoskins’ caliber wind of in this debacle? And how did Megadeth end up on the soundtrack?
House of the Dead – Possibly the  worst video-game-turned-rave-inspired-zombies-on-an-island movie ever.
Street Fighter – Listen closely and throughout this movie, you can hear the sound of action star Jean-Claude Van Damme jumping the shark. Although don’t you actually have to have made at least one good movie to even be considered a shark jumper? I guess Timecop was that one good movie…
Resident Evil: Apocalypse – A surprisingly awful action-horror flick that really doesn’t capture the spirit of the game or the original movie.
Double Dragon – Not even a rare film cameo by Wheel of Fortune's Vanna White could save this crap-tacular karate movie from biting the big one. The plot about finding a magical medallion doesn't help either...

Cinematic Cinematech
PREMIERE DATE: 2/12/2005 (10pm ET / 7pm PT)