Adaptation Decay

This month is a rare split episode, because our initial plan would have resulted in an episode that was too short! First, we cover the 2013 comic book adaptation of Plants vs. Zombies. It's a cute kids' comic about two plucky youngsters to team up with Crazy Dave and his mutant plants to stop the zombies from taking over Neighborville. Is it profound? Not really. But it's a great way to read some...

This month we watch and discuss Wreck-It Ralph , a Disney animated film from 2012. It has a great cast and works in some very fun video game in-jokes before heading into a soggy middle section that kind of drags things down. John C. Riley's performance obviously runs away with the show, but the other big names are no slouches.

This digital comic was created by Valve to coincide with the final Left 4 Dead DLC and show us how the stories of the original four survivors began and ended. Over the course of four issues, Bill, Francis, Louis, and Zoey are captured by the military and escape a horrible fate before deciding what their endgame is. It's a fun comic that integrates well with the game, and highlights how good Valve...

Why does this exist? Even though Mortal Kombat is pretty juvenile, it makes zero sense to create a childrens' cartoon based on the property. So this show from 1996 is already on a bad foot. Additionally, it's also extremely bad. The animation and blocking are poor, the dialogue is 90% cheesy one-liners, and too much of the runtime is taken up by dogfighting in dragon jets. Wait, did you not know t...

Punch Nemesis until he becomes your friend! We go back to the extremely poison well of the Resident Evil movie continuity to see how Alice and co. treat the Raccoon City incident. This is a very poorly-made semi-adaptation of Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, where Alice upstages Jill and punches Nemesis until he becomes her friend. It's extremely bad and dumb, you guys.

This won't go how you think. Get ready for this to be slightly more positive than you expect. When the trailer for Doom: Annihilation came out, we were shocked at how bad it looked. The full product isn't actually "good", but there's some SyFy Original fun to be had here. It's cheap and it lacks subtlety, and it's a vague re-telling of Doom 3 through the eyes of the chosen religious soldier Joan D...

D12s... Not even once. This very boring movie is a relic of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, when concerned parents everywhere got very scared of Dungeons and Dragons without actually learning about the game. Tom Hanks takes a leading role in a story about a college student who loses track of the distinction between fantasy and reality, and his impossibly rich and preppy friends try to lie to the p...

Gary, Kole and special guest Will (Gary's friend and professional writer), tackle what some are calling the best video game adaptation ever. Are they right? No. But it's still a very fun episode. 

For us, it's Wednesday, so come get this Street Fighter movie episode. We decided to begin 2020 with an all-out banger. The 1994 Street Fighter movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Raul Julia is a sight to behold. It's one of the most fun movies we've covered for this show, but it's a complete mess. And it was doomed to be a mess from the start.

This isn't a podcast, it's an act of violence. To celebrate the season, we found three extremely onerous Winter Holiday themed episodes of Nintendo cartoons from the 90s. First and most awfully, we bring you an episode of the Donkey Kong Country cartoon called "The Kongo Bongo Festival of Lights" . DK is bad at doing gifts, and one of the lizards is lonely enough to blow up the world. Second, we l...

Tron is a groundbreaking and important movie that turns the concepts of old arcade games into gladiatorial combat... at least briefly. Even when it goes off the rails, it still gives us cyberpunk concepts that would inspire games for decades to come.

It's as bad as you've heard. We wanted to cover something good after taking a dive on The Wizard last month, but a tragic miscommunication led to us covering Uwe Boll's House of the Dead instead. We're always shocked when terrible things live up to their terrible reputations, but believe us when we say this movie is preternaturally awful. It deserves all of the scorn it's gotten, and no claim of "...

It's so bad. A long time ago, it was very novel to see video games in other media. This was the appeal of Nick Arcade, another topic we covered on this show. But not even that novelty can save a bad script, and boy howdy, have we got a doozy. Corey breaks his little brother Jimmy out of an institution in order to drag him across the country and play video games for money. They meet another unsuper...

Detective Pikachu made a big splash before its release by audaciously featuring realistically-rendered Pokémon in a live action setting. While those 'mons are absolutely the high point of this adaptation, the film itself is a perfectly serviceable kids' flick with lots of good moments.

A monument to man's folly. In what stands as a monument to human folly, this extreme waste of money adapts the Warcraft brand into a thoroughly mediocre movie that could easily be read as a parody of fantasy tropes. Made for China and released elsewhere only incidentally, this bland light show will make you angrier than any Uwe Boll movie except Postal, probably.

Gary and Kole chat about the surprisingly decent Dishonored comic that no one else has ever talked to you about. 

Kill ingeniously. Timothy Olyphant cannot save this one... at least that's what one of us thinks, because this is a classic Duckfeed Showdown! Agent 47 is wrapped up in a plot hatched by Russian hardliners, and only jurisdiction can save him.

Everyone sing along to the theme song, and remember to make up your own words. It's about as nostalgic as Carmen Sandiego, but leagues less educational. Regardless, Nick Arcade was one of the only places a little kid in the early 90s could see video games on television. So listen to us talk about the technical hurdles they had to overcome, and the very strange show that became the result.

Double Trouble has stolen another fuckin' quarry. In this episode, we look at the very good game show and the very bland cartoon based on the hottie amazon known as Carmen Sandiego. 

We've got Resident Evil on the brain after playing the magnificent remake of Resident Evil 2. So we decided to turn our attention toward a different kind of adaptation... Capcom's first attempt to expand the RE continuity into CGI film. Resident Evil: Degeneration takes place shortly after RE4, and it has Leon and Claire teaming up to clean up another T-virus mess. Also a mess: this movie. It's co...

We're as surprised as you are that a Bloodborne comic turned out pretty good! Titan Comics doesn't have a great track record with Soulsborne properties. Their Dark Souls comics are bad and weird, as we discussed in a long-ago episode of Bonfireside Chat. So we're pleasantly surprised to say that their take on Bloodborne actually works! A few hiccups aside, it's a good supplement to the story and w...

A side effect of Valkyr is sucking all of the fun out of a movie. The problem with adapting something that is such a pastiche is that you risk just making another version of whatever inspired the pastiche. When Hollywood set out to adapt Max Payne, which itself is an homage to crime and noir films, they avoided that. Instead, they made a really mediocre mid-2000s action movie and profoundly miscas...

Pixels just sucks. It suuuuucks. It sucks. Are you ready for some garbage!? Holy moly, this Adam Sandler movie about invading alien video game characters is just straight up gutter-leavin's. Its humor is outdated, the deliveries are halfhearted, and the visual effects are ugly and confusing. Thankfully, Peter Dinklage is in about 1/4 of the movie to brighten things up. Otherwise, this nostalgia bo...

Johnny Cage is not afraid to die, but we weren't prepared for this album. We aim for variety on this show. We don't want to fall into a rut of just covering bad video game movies. Sometimes we want to cover bad video game music, too. Mortal Kombat mania produced a lot of cultural output, but nothing matches the sheer idiocy of Mortal Kombat: The Album , by The Immortals, a side project of Lords of...

Not even Jeremy Irons can save this catastrophe. It's hard to believe it, but the Dungeons and Dragons movie came out in the year 2000. It looks and feels much older than that, hearkening back to a shoddier time in filmmaking. Not even the fully-committed hammery of Jeremy Irons can save this misguided and ramshackle disaster.