movie games Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Ever since I was old enough to know what the POWER button does, I was a video game fanatic. I grew up in the golden era of the Atari 2600, Intellivision, Colecovision ... damn, I'm old. But I was born at just the right time to chart the evolution of the modern video game. Hell, my dad even worked in a Radio Shack and, yes, once brought home an amazingly clunky Pong system. I wasn't TRULY infected by the movie bug until I was about 14, but I was a wizened old video game junkie by that point. (And yet I still had time to eat, sleep, and read books. I was like a prodigy or something.)

So yeah: My two passions have always been movies and video games. Unfortunately, things don't always work out so well when people turn video games into movies -- but I thought it might be fun to flip that equation the other way. As in, a semi-regular feature in which I (or someone else) focuses on a video game that has something to do with movies. And I'm not talking about every single X-Men, Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings tie-in that falls off the xBox / PS3 assembly line (although we'll get to those once in a while), but games that actually deal with movies in general.

As an example I'll use one of the coolest, smartest, and most durable movie games out there: Yep, the Hollywood Stock Exchange. has been kicking for well over a decade, and it remains one of the most popular activities available for hardcore movie nuts who have half a brain for facts, figures, and decimal points. I know the interface is a lot less complicated than it looks, but I'm still kind of intimidated by the HSX. (I believe my last transaction was about three years ago when I invested four million dollars in Twister 2.)

Of course in the future the Movie Games feature will offer a lot more information on much newer games, but that's why this was called "the introduction," right? If you have any suggestions for online movie-centric games that deserve some love, well that's why we have a comments section.

UPDATE: As luck would have it, HSX has been taken offline temporarily as the good folks over there prepare for a relaunch next week. We'll let you know when it's back up so you can check out what they've done with the place.

I never expected to get angry in response to something David Bordwell wrote, but his latest blog post infuriated me. As the kind of cinephile who tries his darnedest not to be a pretentious movie jerk, I'm always upset when people expect me to have seen every movie ever made -- or at least every movie presently out in theaters -- and treat me like a fool if I haven't seen this or that supposedly magnificent piece of cinema. Just to clarify, though, I'm not mad at Bordwell. I'm upset with the kind of know-it-all movie geeks who have to show off their cinephilia at every turn.

In the piece, Bordwell attempts to define cinephilia, and I found this part of the post interesting. His qualifications seem to indicate that I am technically a cinephile, despite the fact that I don't see nearly as many films as the people in the documentary Cinemania (those people, he notes, are not cinephiles; they're cinemaniacs). Then he proceeds to lay out conversational scenarios between cinephiles. And it's here that I became annoyed. I'm apparently the guy who has either just seen (random movie title) or has never seen the works of (random filmmaker) or didn't pay enough attention to (random shot) or (random dialogue). I'm slow, I have a bad memory and I do actually take part in other activities besides watching and studying films. So sue me.

When you read this headline, you probably rolled your eyes at the thought of yet another poorly thought-out and rushed-through production video game tie-in for a movie blockbuster. In fact, I did the same thing when I first heard the news. However, it turns out these games are in fact NOT of the electronic "video" variety, but rather the more classic and less popular "board" variety. Not only is there an official Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code: The Board Game: The Quest for Truth headed to a store near you, there are apparently a number of look-alikes hoping to cash in on some of that sweet controversy action. Briarpatch, for one, is bringing you Da Vinci's Challenge, Da Vinci's Challenge: The Card Game (playable as both a standalone as well as an addition to the board game) and Da Vinci Mancala -- I'm not actually sure how this one works, per se. Presumably it is just Mancala with some fancy pictures added in somewhere. Also being published are two other board games named The Da Vinci Code Board Game and The Da Vinci Quest. A few of these have vague licensing associations with the novel, but only The Quest for Truth has official movie tie-ins.

Okay, I'm a big board game fan. Both my families (mine and my fiancee's) enjoy them, and so I get to play quite a bit.  My question is really ... who believes the board game market is deep enough to support this many games based on an action movie/book? Sure, maybe an official game or two could be fun-ish, but do we really need or want a Da Vinci mancala? Somehow I'm just not seeing the draw ... but maybe it's just me.