You know the drill, parts
One,
Two, and
Three are here. This time we're taking a look at movie adaptations inspired by games from the first video game system I ever purchased with my own money, which in less than a year also became my first real lesson concerning both the value of a dollar and the evils of Capitalism - The Sega Dreamcast! Ordinarily, I pick a few of my favorites from each system's catalog, and I have to make some tough choices about which ones I want to include. This time, I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel here, as there was not really a lot to choose from. I try to stick to games I've actually played, but here, I had to take a few liberties on that rule as well.
1: Power Stone
Perhaps the best game for the system that I ever played, or if not, second only to House of the Dead 2, which I couldn't include on this list because it's already been made (shittily, from what I hear, as I've never actually seen it). Power Stone was a fighting game that had a few unique hooks for its time, including an almost completely destructible environment and characters that could take on alternate, more powerful forms by grabbing the titular stones (no double entendre intended) before their opponent. Use the typical fighting game movie format, with an ensemble cast of as many of the characters from the game as you can fit, now in an It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World style race to the finish line to find and claim a set of three magical artifacts separated and hidden around the world that grant ultimate power to whoever can bring them all together. Have the various characters join up into factions, each ready to back stab the others and each other, as only one can reach the goal.
2: Crazy Taxi
A game that I first heard about on the Dreamcast, but never played until much later when it came to the Playstation 2. More broad comedy for this one, as we follow a comically and homicidally overzealous cab driver on a personal mission to always get his passengers to their stated destinations as fast as possible, their health and public safety be damned. I imagine this would involve a lot of mad cap, Blues Brothers style car chases, but centered in a metropolitan city, twisting and turning through alleyways and such. At some point he gets a fare from a woman on the run from the mob or the CIA or something, and doesn't give him a destination, just an order to get her as far away from there as possible and to lose the people chasing her, inadvertently making this crazy philosophy spouting cabbie her unwitting protector, until they eventually fall in love amid the burning wreckage of everyone who tried to go after them.
3: Space Channel 5
A biting satire of media and journalism in the context of a sci-fi dark comedy. Set in the future where network news is dying, the only way they can boost ratings enough to stay on the air is to replace their hardened professional newspeople with chirpy go-go dancers. Ulala, the first and still most famous of this new generation of faux-journalists, is sent to a war zone to report on a growing crisis that eventually puts her in the middle of a hostage negotiation. It's the first real legitimate news story they've had in years, and its so gritty that people are finally tuning in again, but now they have no one else to report on it other than this dancing girl, who now has to prove that she's more than just a gyrating bimbo. And yet, after she fails at doing the news the way everyone says she should, grim and seriously, she discovers that the only way to diffuse the tension and end the war peacefully is by being herself...and dancing!
4: Seaman
An inexplicably popular game at the time that I always took for too weird for the sake of weird, where fish with human faces sardonically spout random facts as you raise them through various stages of life. I maybe played this game for five minutes before the pointless of it almost made me cry. I've got two ways I think this would work. My first thought was a nature mockumentary hosted by Leonard Nimoy, who narrated the original game, as we follow the titular creature in the wild and eventually captivity as a common house pet. The other idea was to do it Free Willy style (as opposed to Big Willy style) in which one Seaman is captured by an aquatic theme park and put on display where it is befriended by a young boy from the streets (read homeless, as all kids in the 90's were) who takes it upon himself to set it back into the wild, This would culminate in a majestic flopping over a rock barrier as it continuously rattles off random and obscure birth day related facts.
5: Samba De Amigo
Like Crazy Taxi, I never actually played this one on the Dreamcast, only later on when it was ported to the Wii. It's a rhythm game, which is probably my second least favorite video game genre after sports games, but its colorful, with an interesting design scheme, all of which I would extract for a live action adaptation. My idea, a man discovers an escaped circus chimp who once maracas are placed in its hands begins to play a captivating rhythmic beat. I'd say this could play out as either an irony fueled tale akin to the old Michigan J. Frog cartoon, where the monkey plays only when no one else is looking, driving the man mad, or a road trip movie where the chimp's new owner drives cross country to enter it into an animal talent reality show, on the run from unscrupulous people who want to exploit it, as its monkey music magic inspires a throng of devoted followers.
6: Trickstyle
Kinda reaching with this one, not a lot of people played this game from what I understand. Not even sure why I bought it actually, considering its not the kind of game I typically like, it's basically a snowboarding race game just like...some other snowboarding race game I might be able to reference if I knew of another one, except with hover boards. Set in the future, there was a plot, I wanna say involving some sort of international conspiracy, but I don't really remember it too clearly. Basically, I'd just make it a futuristic hover board racing remake of Ski School 2.
Yes, that's right, not even Ski School, but Ski School 2. That way you could bring back Wendy Hamilton, and give me an excuse to put pictures like this on my blog:
Yeah, that's the stuff.
So that's it for the Dreamcast, and I mean it, because while I might be able to go back to some of the other systems, I think I've pretty much tapped out this one for adaptable material. I seriously tried to think of a way to make the DC Sonic the Hedgehog game into a movie. That's how bereft of good material I had for this one. Next up, The Playstation 2.
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