(Continued)

The Many, Many Failures

Time for a tangent, but it's a relevant one: In discussing the myriad dreadful movies originating from video games, you have to consider German games-to-movies auteur Uwe Boll. All three of his adaptations appear in the bottom 100 of the Internet Movie Database's user quality rankings. They are "Alone in the Dark," "BloodRayne," and "House of the Dead"; and his latest, "Postal," which is more a self-reflexive self-parody than an adaptation of the violent video game, is due out next year.

Each release was an enormous financial and critical catastrophe. Each can truly be called appalling in every sense of the word to the human body. Like most hacks in any job field, Boll blames everyone for his failure but himself. He frequently criticizes the press for giving his work bad notices using the kind of juvenile, misspelled taunting restricted to only the very worst of blogs. Oh, and he also challenged critics to meet him in the boxing ring to settle matters. Stop his cash flow now!

In the same vein, "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within," a computer-animated version of the popular game series, remains one of the biggest bombs in cinematic history. The movie's release garnered a storm of press coverage for its strikingly realistic human characters, calling into question whether the film industry would even need actors in the future. Those concerns were quickly put to rest when the Columbia Pictures release lost around $105 million, mostly from audience disinterest. Other films, like "Wing Commander," "DOA: Dead or Alive," "Silent Hill," and "Doom" quickly slid off the public's radar despite having enormous built-in fan bases. This occurred mostly because of poor reviews and nonexistent marketing.

Flicks About Gaming

A wealth of films has been made about the actual process of playing video games. As computers developed in the '80s, so did special effects technology. These advances were used to push the envelope in low-rent classics like "Tron," "The Last Starfighter," and, of course, "The Wizard." What geeky child of this decade doesn't have a bruised affection for these titles? We should not rest until "The Wizard" gets a proper DVD release with scene selections and special features.

In more recent years, the notion of virtual worlds operating separately from our own has been explored in the "Matrix" films as well as in "eXistenZ." The latter work, a 1999 thriller starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law, explored a game so real and so intoxicating that it could kill the people who play it. Director David Cronenberg won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for his work. A similar topic was explored, albeit in a much lower B-movie form, in the 2006 teen horror outing "Stay Alive," which featured the great tagline of "You Die in the Game -- You Die for Real."

This past summer, "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters" was released to theaters nationwide. The documentary followed Steve Wiebe, a mild-mannered suburban Seattle schoolteacher who tries to break the world's highest score for "Donkey Kong," held by arrogant, hot-sauce selling champion Billy Mitchell. What makes "King of Kong" so exciting (and often hilarious) is that it explores the lives of people who religiously play video games. It's a world totally alien and slightly charming to the outside viewer: a large grouping of (mostly male) players who connect via the Internet to compare notes and stories. Like any community, there is shared history, controversy and pride. The movie emphasizes the human element of playing video games.

This human element is exactly what's missing from most console-to-screen adaptations. The games' original sense of style is intact, but the fun of sitting in the dark working your way up level by level is gone. The people who love these games are used to being able to interact with their virtual environment. At the movies, their favorite characters are presented in often bastardized forms. They have no control over what happens and no buttons to press. The basic experience of play and exploration is lost on celluloid, where there are no new lives and no game over.

Did you actually like any of the films mentioned above? Have a favorite video game that you're dying to see turned into a movie? Let us know at heymsn@microsoft.com.

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In addition to making regular contributions to MSN Movies, Frank Paiva is a junior at New York University, where he studies theater and writing. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the Seattle Weekly, the Not for Tourists guide, 80108, and EDGE.