Happy Feet Two
0
10
2
2
REALLY?????
TOATALLY PATHETIC! I HATE THE MOVIE AND THE GAMES!!!!
8/12/11
Are They Serious?
Okay. First, a couple of rules of thumb about Hollywood and video games.
First, video games based on movies usually aren't very good. Think Avatar, the video game, and you'll see what I mean. Though, in Avatar's defense, the movie was little more than a very well-animated Dances With Wolves rehash, so the game didn't have much to work with.
But if you go over to Game Rankings and ask it to list the worst games first, you're going to find a LOT of movie tie-ins, some of them recent.
So now we're getting a video game based on another animated movie, and one that you really have to scratch your head over. The original Happy Feet movie was an ambush movie, marketed as a movie about dancing penguins. The finished product, instead, led one reviewer to snark, "Thanks, but I already saw An Inconvenient Truth. I don't need it with my cartoon penguins."
Happy Feet did win the Oscar for best animated feature, and a case can be made for the film's technical merit. But its preachy environmentalism can't have hurt it with Academy voters. Audience reaction, however, was mixed.
More to the point, the game based on the first Happy Feet movie was a godawful mess. Again, look at Game Rankings, look at Metacritic...the first Happy Feet game was a disaster, and it was based on an original movie.
Other rule of thumb in Hollywood: sequels usually aren't as good as the original. If that holds, then a game based on a sequel might very well be even worse than the first one was.
While it's possible that this game might actually break historical trends, I'm not going to hold my breath. Movie tie-in games usually are more tie-in than they are game, and I don't see any reason to think that won't be the case here.
7/10/11