One thing’s pretty clear–some of the oldest game companies out there are getting pounded by the modern game business environment.  Midway’s been getting shellacked, which you can read about right here, and Atari has been in the dumps for quite some time.  This is why we all–Atari included–have reason to be intensely, almost perversely, happy about the recent release of Ghostbusters: The Video Game.

Set as a third person shooter, you’ll charge through the various landmarks of New York as “the new guy” (Venkman insists on not using names as he doesn’t “want to get attached”), the guy (or gal, that’s a possibility) who tests the experimental equipment and is thus most likely to be blown into New Jersey by a malfunctioning proton pack or something similar, which won’t actually happen but considering you’re working with the Ghostbusters, the chances of it happening are fairly likely.  Anyway, the environment has changed, and the city is a lot more tolerant–even downright friendly–of Ghostbusters and their ghostbusting.  The city’s insurance policy has actually been extended to cover the Ghostbusters and the concomitant property damage they incur, so you’ll be able to do whatever needs to be done to clear the city of ghosts. But it’s not just ghosts you’ll have to worry about; there’s a much deeper plot at work here that you’ll also have to break through.

There will be plenty of ghosts, too–you’ll be taking on construction workers and angry sous chefs from beyond the grave and even the Stay-Puft Marshmellow Man within the first six levels.  You’ll get to work the PKE meter and the proton pack and plenty of nifty new gadgets like the highly destructive boson dart system.  You’ll pick up pages of Tobin’s Spirit Guide, the single greatest resource a Ghostbuster can have, and supplement them with actual PKE scans.

I firmly believe that this may be the single best simulation of what it’s like to be a Ghostbuster ever released to date.

Of course, it may well be the ONLY actual simulation of what it’s like to be a Ghostbuster ever released to date, but that’s somewhat beside the point.  In fact, I’m somewhat surprised to see it took as long as it did to get one out.  Some of that, naturally, is to latch onto the resurgence of Ghostbusters with the emergence of the third movie on the horizon but still, they could’ve been pumping these out for YEARS between two and the still upcoming three.

Not that I’m not, on a limited level, happy about this development, of course–if they HAD flooded the market with Ghostbusters games it would’ve seriously tarnished the brand, but this is largely beside the point.  The point is that this is an intensely fun game that packs in plenty of action.  Sure, the controls can be a little hard to grapple with, especially in the Wii version, but it’s still plenty fun to lash out with the proton pack and roll out the trap.  One downside, however, is that the game stops short of giving you the ultimate experience of driving the Ecto-1, the Ghostbusters’ converted ambulance.  That might well have made for the best part of the game, but no–they patently refuse to allow you drive the Ecto-1.  They’ll even MOCK you for not being ALLOWED to drive it.  I’m sorry, but sacrificing a fantastic experience for a cheap joke just isn’t right.

These minor points aside, well, there’s plenty of fun to be had here, and getting your hands on this game should be well worth your time.

It’s not every day I get my hands on a game like X-Men Origins: Wolverine.  Having just covered the movie version of same mere days ago over on our sister site Screenhead, I knew that the game was going to be a baffling little package for plenty of reasons.

Perhaps the biggest of these reasons is that, the movie was a greatly flawed beast that had a lot of wild action fun involved with it.  It virtually ignored canon and went off on a truly bizarre tangent that only resembled in passing any of the previous events.  So knowing what we all know about movie-to-game translations, how would the game version, the Wolverine Uncaged Edition (now available for Playstations two and three, Xbox 360, PC, Wii, PSP, and the Nintendo DS) play for us?

First, the plot—basically, X-Men Origins: Wolverine—Uncaged Edition will follow the movie plot, somewhat, as we follow Wolverine through his military service to where he joined the Weapon X program and beyond from there.  He’ll fight government supersoldiers of every stripe, including his “brother” Sabertooth (which even casual fans will know is a crock of the highest order) to get revenge on the government that betrayed him.

Now…on to the game itself; I don’t remember the last time I played a game involving Marvel characters that was this extravagantly blood-soaked.  And I definitely don’t remember the last time Wolverine did quite this much killing.  Seriously—by the end of the first level he’s going to have a body count higher than any Marvel enterprise I’ve seen lately, and probably higher than the last time Jason Voorhees took a run at some campers.  When Wolverine’s outkilling the undead juggernauts of my favorite horror classics I know something is GRAVELY wrong.

And the plotlines of the movie and the game will actually be somewhat divergent.  How divergent, you wonder?  Well, let me put it to you this way—the game will involve Sentinels.  You see so much as a robot in the movie?  No?  Well, neither did I.  I’m having a hard time with this game—most movie translations to game at least TRY to look like the movie they’re translated from, but this is just ridiculous.  And sure, I’m glad that a Marvel property actually tried to be mature for once, but all this blood is actually sort of out of place.  I remember thinking, this is why Wolverine pretty much had to be a good guy.  If he were evil he’d be an unstoppable killing machine.  And this is actually the biggest problem of all.

Wolverine is supposed to heal up from pretty much any damage, up to and including being shot in the skull with adamantium bullets.  That’s canon.  We saw that in the movie, too.  So how do you translate this into a play mechanic that doesn’t end up with the character being invincible?  Sadly, you can’t—thus, you have to water down Wolverine—give him a health bar and force him to regenerate by not taking damage until you can recover.

So really, the movie to game translation of X-Men Origins: Wolverine—Uncaged Edition is much bloodier, and yet at the same time much less substantial than the movie.  And the movie wasn’t saying much to begin with, so it’s safe to say unless you’re dying for that sweet Wolvie Berserk Style in your gameplay, this one isn’t worth a snikt.

It’s not every day that I have much of anything good to say about a game translation of a movie, especially one that I have such mixed feelings about to begin with as Transformers.  But the Transformers game, not so ironically entitled Transformers: The Game and now available for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii, PC, and a panoply of portable systems, managed to do something a little interesting, and thus earns a couple extra points.

See, in Transformers: The Game, playing as the Autobots basically lets you go through the movie, where you’re out to recover the AllSpark before the Decepticons do, and you’ve got to protect Sam Witwicky and basically do all those things you did in the movie.  Meanwhile, if you play as the Decepticons, you get to do the exact same thing just from the Decepticon side.  In fact, if you actually WIN as the Decepticons, you’ll manage to unlock a whole new ending, which will not turn out to be a surprise, but the sheer fact that a game translation of a movie took that kind of effort is worth noting.

We all know that most movie to game translations are shovelware of the highest magnitude.  This month’s PC Gamer, for example, refers to those who work PR for licensed games as having one of the “worst jobs in the gaming industry” and describes their work as “unthusiasm” and “soul crushing”.  They’re on par with retail gamer store workers, game testers, mascots, and the poor sucker who works the Xbox Live abuse reports box.  So for a movie to game translation to show a little initiative—like making alternate endings for the two warring factions—is a noteworthy step.  Not a HUGE noteworthy step, but a noteworthy step nonetheless.

The down side, of course, is that the gameplay sucks out loud.  All you do is transform, roll out to a certain destination, transform, beat some robots down, transform, roll out to your NEXT destination and repeat it until either you win the game, your eyes start to bleed or you curl up into a fetal position wailing about how you’ve wasted your life.  Believe me, that sort of thing happens more often than you think.

Yes, it’s the kind of game you’ve played literally over and over again for the last few years now and it hasn’t gotten that much better.  Sure, they went the extra mile and for that I’ll give them due credit but it’s really little more than a massive pile of elephant dung that happens to have an orchid growing out of it.  That one particular part of the whole may be pretty but the rest of it is just crap.

So basically, if you’ve seen the movie a few dozen times, can’t get enough of the ORIGINAL voice of Optimus Prime (that’s another critical area of importance—seems the games brought back Peter Cullen and Frank Welker to handle the original voices,  at least that’s the case on the Wii version), and are willing to put up with a whole lot of more of the same, then this is the game for you.  Otherwise, well, you’re probably better off staying away from movie to game translations entirely.