5. The Warriors - XBox 2006
The Warriors was one of those rare movies that walked the fine line of reality and fantasy, but never truly chose which one it was. The movie followed a group of leather vest clad hooligans trying to make it back to Coney Island after an official "Get To Know Your Neighbors" meeting of ever gang in New York City. It's cartoonish over the top approach to gangs, but matter of fact understanding of violence and sex immortalized it forever in American cult cinema. Usually, the gaming industry pisses all over the memories of great movies just like that. But, rather than pushing through some formulaic crap-in-a-can with a Warriors stamp on top of it, Rockstar Games decided to reinvent the modern brawler game and pay homage to a classic movie with one stroke of the brush....keyboard....whatever. Rockstar used The Warriors (
which still sells for a new game rate) as a vehicle for recreating the fun of the brawler game. Players were introduced to a semi-sandbox/semi-linear world, which allowed them to complete each level at their own pace, while constantly on the look out for collectibles. Rockstar included side missions and "spray paint" quests in every level, and left people scouring the level for places to leave the gang's tag. And since the original movie only covered about 5 hours of a single night in NYC, the developers decided to go ahead and write an entire 3 month back story, complete with playable missions for how each character joined the gang. In essence, Rockstar took a series of events that were previously isolated (9 guys running all night), and set them in a new light, and they did it all with most of the original cast doing the voice acting. But, what left the lasting memory was the combat. Instead of the normal mix of button mashing and other button mashing, Rockstar developed a deeply involved combat system, which required timing and cooperation. Since the game's combat is based on street gangs bashing the bejesus out of each other, the world is full of stuff with which to do exactly that. Players could pick up bricks, bats, pipes, bottles, spray paint, 2x4's and pretty much anything else you might find laying in the streets of one of the world's largest cities. That inanimate object could then find new purpose inside of a bad guy's face. And of course, it wouldn't be fun gang violence if half the time your friend wasn't holding someone down, while you stabbed him in the gut with a broken bottle, hence the option to play the entire game co-op or take on your friends in vs mode.
How The Sequel Could Work...
Easy as pie, that's how. The movie left a lot of unanswered questions, that the game later answered like, "why are these gangs so strange, who are these people, where are their shirts." The game beginning three months prior to the movie gives us the answers to a lot of those (not the shirt thing), but they both end at the same place. The Warriors finally reach home, several of them dead or in prison, and stand on the beach. That's it. That's the end. You never really know what might become of them. The sequel would, of course, follow The Warriors into the future. I'm not talking like spending their entire adult lives in prison future, just the months following the "big meeting" and the events of the movie. Not much would really need to be changed to make the game epic. The stealth system, the combat system, the ability to get arrested or rescued from the cops, none of it would really need to change; just updated. The one aspect of the game that could use improvement is the co-op splitscreen, which the developers designed to be vertical split, limiting the field of vision. The oft-criticized camera would mesh the splitscreen together, if player 1 and 2 got close enough, and split, when they when their separate ways. The result was a camera that was too small to accurately see what was happening around you, unless you were 5 feet from your friend. Fix that one thing, and a Warriors sequel would easily make it to the top 5 beat em up games of all time.