Analog Gamers Gaming From a Slightly Different Perspective

Well, I’m sure just about everyone has seen the new Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen movie trailer by now. If you couldn’t guess it on your own, there’s also been an announcement that there will be a tie-in video game to go along with it.

My question is this: WHY?!? Why is it that Hollywood feels the need to commission a video game of every action movie, or any movie that is even loosely gaming-friendly? I realize that they’re in business to make money, but the last Transformers video game was so heinously bad that I can’t for the life of me believe that it turned a profit. If it did, I weep for the gaming public that subjected itself to that.

Am I the only one who thinks that video games, simply due to their exploding popularity, have become almost a knee-jerk reaction? Something along the lines of, “Oh, were’s making a movie based on a comic book/robots/sci fi, let’s make sure we get a video game tie-in. Is there some sort of flowchart for this hidden away somewhere?

Who knows, maybe it is just me. All I know is that if we could divert some of the development money that gets wasted on these movie based video games (nearly all off which, with the exception of Escape from Butcher Bay, are horrible) into better game projects, maybe we could raise the quality level of games across the board. Heck, just eliminating the movie tie-ins would do that.