The game we've all been waiting for has finally arrived, Halo 3, an instant Xbox 360 classic that rewards our patience by exceeding our highest and wildest expectations. Like many other games these days, Halo has been earmarked for movie adaptation. Responding to this exciting but also worrying news, Blockbuster.co.uk's Marshall Julius takes a look at the troubled genre of films based on videogames.

Let's be honest, right from the start. Movies inspired by videogames don't have a great reputation. That's because they're rarely any good or even half-decent. Offering plenty of action but little in the way of plot or character development, the majority of videogames serve as poor source material. Even the smarter ones don't seem to score at the cinema, games that tell an epic tale and do their best to flesh out the characters between the chasing, killing and ledge jumping. It could be that the right man hasn't come along yet, a visionary type who sees the potential in game flicks and figures out how to make them work as movies. Someone like screenwriter David Goyer, who revitalized superhero cinema with Batman Begins. Or maybe it's just a doomed, intrinsically flawed genre best avoided by filmmakers and audiences alike.

That's not to say they're all entirely charm free. Just most of them. Certainly everything ever made by the worst offender in the world of videogame features: Uwe Boll. Widely considered the worst director in the business, not that he's short of competition, Boll's game-to-movie output includes zombie flop House of the Dead (2003), horrible horror flick Alone in the Dark (2005), inept fantasy BloodRayne (2005) and Jason Statham actioner In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007).

"Let's be realistic," argues the director defensively. "What is House of the Dead? It's a brainless shooter, where you shoot zombies into pieces. So what are you expecting from the movie - Schindler's List? I think I made a perfect House of the Dead movie, because it really shows how the game is. It's a lot of fun, it's over-the-top action - it's not 28 Days Later, because the reality is that House of the Dead is about how it's a lot of fun to shoot zombies. It's cheesy entertainment with a lot of gore and a lot of violence, and it's super-fast."

Though defensive of his own work, Boll is happy to bash the videogame movies he didn't direct. "I liked Doom (2005) a little," he concedes. "It wasn't a really bad movie, but it wasn't really good either. I think the guy who made Doom definitely saw Alone in the Dark." As for the planned 2009 adaptation of Halo, produced by Peter Jackson, "I personally think that with the huge budget they've planned, Halo will be a failure. I think Halo will not make the money back in the end." Originally Jackson asked Guillermo del Toro to direct the sci fi war adventure, but he wisely passed to work instead on Hellboy 2: The Golden Army (2008). In his place, at least at the time of writing, visual effects guy Neill Blomkamp will be directing. With only two shorts to his credit, the first-time feature maker hardly seems qualified to helm a multi-million dollar blockbuster, but then I can't imagine Peter Jackson hiring someone he didn't believe was up to the task. So we'll just have to wait and see.

Boll complains that lack of support from game developers plays a large part in the failure of his movies. "The reality is that a lot of the videogame companies are quite sloppy," he reveals. "They're happy to sell the license, but then they don't give a shit about it, which is not the right approach."

Regardless of the distance game companies keep from their Hollywood stooges (and really who can blame them?), clearly it's down to the filmmakers to make a decent movie. Bitching about bad promotion doesn't change the fact they made a lousy film. Clearly the responsibility and therefore the blame lies with the writers, producers, directors and stars of such celluloid scraps as Super Mario Bros (1993), Street Fighter (1994), Double Dragon (1994), Wing Commander (1999), Silent Hill (2006), the Resident Evil trilogy (2002, 2004 & 2007), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) and worse still Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003).

The co-founder and managing director of Valve, the company responsible for videogame sensation Half-Life, Gabe Newell admits he never misses a videogame movie, though not by choice. "I have to put on my professional, 'I'm doing this for the company' hat, not the 'I'm a moviegoer whose soul is going to be crushed by another unbelievably crappy game adaptation' one." Strong words indeed. "I just think that there's an attitude right now that they're trying to exploit the built-in audience of gamers and they don't really care whether the movies are any good."

Newell reveals there's a tax loophole in Germany which means investors "...don't really care how profitable the movies are either, so you have this collision of people who are not long-term stakeholders who just think, 'what are the next five movies I can crank out before the German government closes this tax loophole?' And 95% of the gaming movies are being made specifically for those reasons." FYI, Uwe Boll and the majority of his investors are German.

Newell says that while numerous Half-Life movie scripts have been submitted for his approval, alas, "they all sucked. They're just bad movies - movies that shouldn't get made. I'm a huge movie fan," he elaborates. "I love going to movies and we have absolutely no reason to do it. It's not like they've offered us these giant buckets of cash and said, let us go and ruin your game'. They offer you tiny amounts of cash, so it's like they've not even tried to bribe us to make a bad movie. Unless it's a great movie, unless it's as exciting a movie as the game was a game, it will never get made. We don't just want some vanity piece. We've seen what happens to those sort of movies and the world would be a better place if nine tenths of those projects had never happened."

Speaking of films the world would probably be better without, be aware that Boll is currently presiding over feature adaptations of BloodRayne II: Deliverance (2007), Far Cry (2008) and Alone in the Dark II (2009), with more to come. On a more positive note, the Luc Besson-produced adaptation of Hitman (2007), in cinemas this October, is looking like quite a jolly romp. Appearing as Agent 47 in the French/American co-production is Timothy Olyphant, the bad guy from the new Die Hard movie, and word is that sequels are already in the pipeline. Which sounds a little overconfident to me, but who knows? Maybe it'll buck the trend and actually be good. Or at least, good enough.

For the record, I quite liked Mortal Kombat (1995), Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) and, purely for the jiggle factor, DOA: Dead or Alive (2006). And I didn't completely hate the Resident Evil movies. That's about it though, at least for now. Despite myself, there are some projects I'd like to believe have a chance. Halo, for one, but only if Peter Jackson's all over it. The industry's best hope for a genuine success story, it could save or, equally, obliterate the genre. Either way being fine by me. And until Halo decides the fate of the game-film universe in 2009, there'll be lots of other films to see cautiously or else avoid like the plague, stuff like Driver in 2008, and later in 2009, Tekken, Castlevania, Spy Hunter and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Hopefully not all of those are being made for tax purposes.

What did you think of this article?
Click here to contact our editorial team.