15 Great Video Games That Would Most Likely Be Terrible Movies

8. Batman Arkham City

While Arkham City is an incredibly awesome game, and probably the best one made to date involving a superhero, the plot is rather boring and would make for a terrible movie. Some of our readers might be freaking out on the words "boring" and "plot" being used in a sentence referring to Arkham City, but hear me out. The centerpiece of the plot, wherein an entire district of Gotham City has been converted into a giant prison for the most dangerous criminals around is gonna be hard enough for the audience to swallow, but once you get past that hook there's really not much to keep the story interesting. What starts off as Batman investigating Dr. Hugo Strange and his ultimate goals gets side tracked into a "find a cure" tale that's formulaic enough that I'm pretty sure I saw a diagram in a chemistry textbook about it. That distraction gets distracted itself as other elements like Ras Al Ghul's league of assassins and the Penguin are brought into the story with little clear motive and even those elements can easily get lost in the shuffle of tracking down the Riddlers statues to find out where he's got his hostages or the half dozen minor villains who show up for brief side quests most of which seem to be setting things up for the next game. All of these elements feel like fragments of separated Batman plots that have been stitched together into one larger frankenplot. The reason that this all ends up working so well is that it's a secondary element to a game that primarily focuses on "you get to be Batman!" which works so well that the flaws and faults of the story are incredibly forgivable. If you take out the playable element of Arkham City (which would also remove a lot of tedious scenes of penny ante thugs getting beat up and Batman grapple hook travelling around the city) what you'd be left with is a mish mash plot that either takes way too long to get to the finale because Batman keeps stalling one mission to solve another or a movie that adds an extra hour to the plot as Bats goes around the city taking care of lesser villains after handling Strange and the Joker. If you take out those side plots, you lose the feel of what makes Arkham so unique. This is really a text book example of how videogames and movies are each capable of telling stories that the other medium can't. Finally, the simple fact is that no actors can ever be a better Batman than Kevin Conroy or a better Joker than Mark Hamill. Those guys exist in a realm of fan appreciation that makes them untouchable.
 
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A writer and college student living in Eugene Oregon. Currently writing a sci-fi novel on twitter.