Adaptations

In Real Life

Newsflash: Most Profitable Games Movies Were, Actually, Terrible

11:00AM July 28, 2009 | Owen Good

Let’s remember, in a year when folks are talking optimistically about a Gears of War movie, the history such franchises are up against. Game adaptations might make money. But as films, they suck without exception. More »


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Atari Games Too Bad to be True

11:00AM August 17, 2008 | Owen Good

Watercooler Games saw this earlier in the week and gave a detailed deconstruction of how a Free the Falklands! concept would be graphically impossible on the Atari 2600. I took one look and knew it was satire because one of the writers for this site, Jason Torchinsky, is a comedian and a name I remember as the editorial cartoonist of The Daily Tar Heel back when I was at N.C. State’s Technician in the early 1990s.

But play along, because it’s funny. Why look, his site, the Van Gogh-Goghs, have unearthed from some New Mexico landfill documented evidence of 11 scrapped projects for the Atari 2600! The casualties included such licensing/adaptations as Bosom Buddies (a cross between Kaboom! and Donkey Kong, and Kramer vs. Kramer (like Pong with children). My favourite, because I like poop jokes, is Gunther Gebel-Williams’ Cage Cleaner. The bogus rationale for the bogus game sounds like pure pre-video-game-crash self-b.s.ing: “You can’t blow up asteroids in real life, but you sure as [expletive deleted]can clean up [expletive deleted] “.

The Best Atari 2600 Games You Never Heard Of [The Van Gogh-Goghs, via Water Cooler Games]

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