Gamespotting 009 - Games On The Big Screen

Films that have been based on video game titles or series have never rearly worked as a film, they mostly seen as commertial flops and don't recapture the originality of the games they are trying to portray.

Some notable films that don't recreate the magic of the original game include the awful Street Fighter film (The Live action one, not the animated ones), Mortal Kombat (With the dance theme as the finishing credits) and the truly awful Super Mario Bros (With Bob Hoskins as Mario, lol), but I may have found some video game based films that gain a little bit of respectability back from the film industry.

There are several titles that I have watched over the last few weeks which all have got acclaim from film journalists, won awards and have shown me that you can make a good film about video games, here are the titles that I have found;

• The King Of Kong: A Fistfull of Quarters: the first title that I watched, about the rivalry between the Donkey Kong world champion Billy Mitchell and a challenger Steve Wiebe, who throughout the course of the film outdo each other and constantly swap the world title between the two of them, the film has caused some controversary as the events of the film are supposed to be false.

• Chasing Ghosts: Beyond The Arcade: A more of extension to the King Of Kong as it fills you in in some of the events that happened in the arcade boom of the mid 80s such as the people who were listed as the world champions of classic arcade games, (including Billy Mitchell's Donkey Kong World Record) and some of the disputes that these listings have caused ever since.

• FRAG - Now I haven't seen this film yet as it has not been released,but listing this as it looks like a great film. FRAG is about the world of professional gaming; mainly around the FPS titles such as Unreal Tournament, Painkiller and Quake. I am rearly looking forward to this title, but not sure if it is coming over here.

• 8 BIT - Another title that is already out, but can only find the trailer at the moment. This film is about the like between Video Games and Art, so looks a good watch if can find any more footage.

I am looking forward to seeing some of these titles and hope more are to come with most of these winning best film awards at the Sundance Film Festival and best of all, I can say that there are some good films about Video Games and Uwe Boll is nowhere in the convosation.