At least MDK was good.

If Team Shiney is reading this......
PLEASE give me Sacrifice 2!!! You dropped it in order to make that crappy Matrix game instead. Please go back and recreate one of the most cool, fun, and unique action/RTS titles that ever saw the light of day.

Path of Neo was a lot better than Enter the Matrix. Shiny was at least able to redeem themselves to some degree.

You'll get no thanks for it if it's a pile of shit, obviously.

Somebody tell me what is wrong with Enter the Matrix!!

I mean, what more could you possibly want from a movie game?

An orginal story, that ties into the movie.
Professionally filmed sequences that are not in the movie
A cool bullet time mode
And everything was overseen by the directors!

What more could you possibly want??

Many film directors treat the movie spin off like a bastard child....but I feel that the Wachowski brothers really made an entertaining game.

While its true that it was a tad bit buggy, and seemed rushed, I had a TREMENDOUS amount of fun playing this game. Granted, it wasn't game of the year material, but it was easily a "B" to "B+" in my book.

If this was just "Generic Game A" I feel that it would have gotten a much better score. But since this was the fabled "Matrix Game" many people had expectations that were, lets say, a tad bit too high.

The only fair review that this game every received was in "Play magazine. I don't remember the EXACT score, but I do know that it was in the "B" range.

Many people dig too deep into the Matrix franchise. While it is definitely a thinking man's action movie, it is still just that, an action movie. And I feel we can draw a parallel to the game as well. After all, it was JUST an action game.

Enter the Matrix was every bit as good as the movie it tied into.

Whatever happened to the time when movie games were good. Both Krull and TRON are at the top of my favorite arcade games. And don't get me started on the sit-down version of Star Wars ("The Force will be with you...always)

Enter the Matrix was ok. The Path of Neo was really really good.

@FarmboyinJapan:
Actually, to be honest, I did enjoy Enter the Matrix a bit. It wasn't that bad. It was nifty in how it was an extra bit of the story rather than a retelling. When I went to see Reloaded it was pretty cool hearing characters reference events from the game.

But despite that, it was still pretty mediocre. I knew I'd never play it again once I finished it.

Half-decent movie tie-ins I remember: Ghostbusters, Robocop, Terminator 2 (the arcade game with the guns), Star Wars, Total Recall.

Crap movie tie-ins I remember: ALL OTHER MOVIE TIE-INS.

Don't do it, kids!

I enjoyed Enter The Matrix a lot. Sure it wasn't 'awesome', but it doesn't deserves the bad reputation it's picked up.

I LOVED Enter the Matrix! The gameplay was excellent, and the story was good - not just some crappy retelling of The Matrix, but a whole new part of the storyline. Ok, the game took no skill - maybe they could've required you to aim a little, or something.

The graphics were about average I'd say, and some of the cutscenes were really good - Live action FTW - and some were really bad - hexagonal tyres FTL. But overall I think it was a great game with a few medium sized flaws. But it was FUN - one of the most directly fun games I've ever played.

And it had depth, so I think it deserves at least a bit of credit.

@PurpleSfinx:

Amen.

The nerds don't like it when you mess with their beloved franchises. And this is how they retaliate. By giving it a bad score, and black listing it by word of mouth.

But as a game, I loved it.

There's only one movie game worth any money - and a really good 3D-reincarnation of the brawler-genre a la Streets of Rage: The Warriors

I'm still playing it from time to time, and it's nearly perfect and adds a lot to the background.

lot of people loved Enter the Matrix...including myself...

don't know what was so wrong with the game...

fun combat system, pretty good plot, not great but still pretty good, and graphics were damm nice for that time period...

fixed few stuff here and there in Path of Neo but still don't get why so many reviewers didn't like Enter the Matrix....

Yeah - still scratching my head over that one - Enter the Matrix was a lot of fun - the only thing I didn't like was the bonus games - the white corridor stuff - way too hard. Oh, and the hacking - couldn't be arsed with it. The main game was a blast though and the story was arguably better than either of the Matrix sequel movies (well, Revolutions anyway...)

I think the problem most people had for it was the main characters, Ghost and Niobe. While both were pretty unique additions to the Matrix franchise, they would not have been my first choice as the main characters for the first Matrix game.

In my opinion, most players wanted to play through a Matrix game through the eyes of Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus instead of two brand new characters who, although were important in Reloaded and Revolutions, seemed like minor characters in the grand scheme of things (Ghost being the best example).

I always wondered why they didn't create a Matrix game that covered the time between the first and second movies. This six months to a year and a half is just casually referenced in the movies without actually delving too much into.

Best movie tie-in: Goldeneye. I'm pretty sure Rare set out to make the ultimate multiplayer game and then, noticing they were low on funds, got the movie license and tacked on a single-player campaign.

You have to actually have a good game that you wrap the licensed movie IP around. It's that simple.

@FranUnFine: And that was made years afterwards.

Games based on movies CAN be good, IF they're not trying to basically cash in on it. The Warriors actually made the movie more popular.

It's inevitable though, they are going to get done one way or another, no matter what happens...there will always be a publisher willing to take the risk on a huge movie series like the Matrix, and you will almost always be able to find a game studio willing to get another title.

@CrimsonPhantom: That's part of it. They wanted to make the game a 'behind the scenes' game. Saddly it ended very poorly with a terrible level design and a buggy environment.

Oh and the story was shit too!

Which is a shame because the combat system is one of the smartest for it's time.

No one else thought this was gonna be about a Half-Baked game??? Damn you RSS feed!

@FarmboyinJapan: Did you seriously say that Enter the Matrix was only a "tad bit buggy"? The xbox version had numerous, game-ending bugs. Enter the Matrix is the poster child of rushed development to meet a movie release date. Oh, that and Spiderman 3.

The worst game movie is Spiderman 2 for the PC.

It has the same box and screenshots as the console versions but it's a completely different, and terrible, game.

@Super_Nintendo_Chalmers:

I played through the Xbox version multiple times, and I've not had it lock up on me once.

I was working at an EB Games when the game was released, and I would hear horror stories from customers, but I've never had a problem.

What does Joey Fatone have to do with this story?

@Sabre_Justice: Well, I'd rather wait 18 years for a good adaption then get a crappy one at the time the movie is out. ;)

@FARMBOYINJAPAN: A few more month of polish would have been nice. Enter the Matrix wasn't a bad game by any means, but neither was it a great one. It had its moments of greatness and its moments of total mediocrity. Would they have spend a few more month on it, it could have been quite a bit better then it was. Releasing a game the same time as a movie just doesn't work well.

@Tybee:

"What does Joey Fatone have to do with this story?"

Quoted for Truth.

I was thinking the exact same thing. David Perry should consider boy-banding as a side job.

Better yet, bring us an Earthworm Jim game for XBLA. I miss EWJ (even though it has the same number of syllables as "Earthworm Jim").

Bring on the tiny Elvi!

@Kuraudo: Well played.
Still can't believe I spent money on the piece of shit. Any of them.

Enter the Matrix wasn't a bad game. It just got a bad reputation that people who haven't actually played it latched onto. The driving sequences really sucked, but so did the ones in Gears of War. The combat was what really made the game fun.

Aladdin was a movie tie-in. and it was awesome

This is kinda like the second segment on Cheaters... you know, when the guilty party comes back on the show to explain themselves and give relationship advice...

Despite how bad Enter the Matrix may have been, it still sold a lot of copies.

From the article:

"In the game business we don't really have that as much. There's a few examples where you get someone like Will Wright. But a lot of the time the vision is immediately compromised by what the programmers will be willing to do. They'll say, 'there's not enough memory of there's not enough of this or that'. It's this crippling blow that the game takes before production even starts. I'd love to see more of the Hollywood way where whatever it is we need to get to the point where we can say 'that vision rocks, let's make it happen', does actually happen. Let's assemble the programming team, let's get experts in and try to make that vision come to life. Listening to Clive Barker talk about Jericho, I imagine he would throw a pitch out there and the programmers would start tearing it apart."

This kind of attitude just pisses me off. Games are not movies, they're software - Hollywood doesn't have to deal with consoles that have specific hardware limitations. The programmers are not trying to limit your magical vision. They're telling you what's POSSIBLE. And if they didn't do that, we would have nothing but projects that run over-schedule and over-budget before being released as unplayable garbage (does nobody remember the Ion Storm mess?). Remember, this industry was started by programmers, not designers.

Now, I'm not saying you don't need creative people. You do, otherwise the limits would never be pushed, and you'd never get great innovations like GTA3. And a game developer purely focused on technology is just plain dull - look at id Software. But creative people also need to understand the tools they're working with, so that they can work around their limitations, not against them. I'm sure it's great fun to toss out unworkable ideas for games, but it's definitely not when you're the person who has to stay at work until 2:00AM trying to make those ideas into a functional reality.

Didn't Perry also do the Earthworm Jim games? Those games were sic!

You're bang on there MRLAHEY.

MDK is a movie tie-in?

Enter the matrix isn't bad. No, not at all.
And as a movie tie-in made mainly for the movie fans, I think it's pretty good and interesting.

You know, he made Earthworm Jim too. Surely that counts for something?