I don't deny that it could have been better, but I believe they did the best they could with the budget available.

30 million was a pretty decent budget even in 1999
thats 10 million less then the sixth sense
and on par with austin powers 3

so they could have done better with the budget given to them

I absolutely love the wing commander game series, I have them all here except for 4. But have no real interest in seeing the movie.

I'd say the main let down with Wing Commander was the somewhat poor acting talent. They spent most of the budget on special effects and skimped on the actors, it would appear.

I'm pretty sure the movie hada better budget than the games, and the FMV parts of the games actually looked better. Not to mention had better actors, writing and story. WIng Commander 4's FMV parts cut together make for a way better movie than the actuall movie.
Exactly. Max Payne could have been a perfect movie. All they had to do was follow the game's script and style.

And hire anyone other than Mark Wahlberg.

I've seen a great deal of video game movies, let me tell you that not one is very good, and ultimately just left me wishing I was playing the game instead.

Alone in the Dark - Uwe Boll, terrible acting, huge fucking plot holes, terrible effects, jack shit to do with the games.

BloodRayne - Uwe Boll, terrible acting, absolutely nothing to do with the games, decent gore effects though.

POSTAL - Uwe Boll, try hard trash that's so loosely connected together, terrible acting, everything that happens in this movie doesn't fucking matter, it's the definition of a waste of time. Go watch Hobo With a Shotgun instead.

DOOM - Absolute garbage, if you took the DOOM title away it would make zero difference. It has NOTHING to do with DOOM or DOOM 3, feels like a watered down Aliens or Event Horizon. Boring and cringy trash. Cept for The Rock. The Rock is always amazing. Even at his worst.

Prince of Persia - Saw it once, remember it having some elements of the game but overall it must be pretty unmemorable because I can't remember shit except they tried to get Jake Gyllenhaal, a Swedish white man, to play a Persian... really wtf m8.

Super Mario Bros. - Do I really have to say anything at all?

Mortal Kombat - Lack of gore, lack of violence, Christopher Lambert sounds like he ate a whole bag of cat litter, cringy dialogue... just a really boring fighting flick tbh. Also the CGI is laughably bad now.

Mortal Kombat Annihilation - This. Fucking. Movie. Is one of the worst movies I've seen period. It might actually be so bad it's good. AWFUL acting, switched actors from the previous movie, AWFUL special effects, TERRIBLE dialogue between characters, TERRIBLE fight choreography... you'd swear Uwe Boll directed this one.

Double Dragon - Just a shitty cash in, I actually never finished it because when they showed the brothers standing in front of a Double Dragon arcade machine my mind was sent into a rage and I quit. Should you decide to watch this movie to the end you have a lot to look forward to I'm sure.

Resident Evil, all of them - How do these movies keep getting made? Why do people keep buying them? With each one they drift further and further away from the game's material. With such fantastic titles like "Retribution", "Afterlife", "Extinction" and "Apocalypse". The characters and dialogue is just so dry and the action sequences are cliche and kinda boring. I'm guessing it has to be a guilty pleasure to most. Even James Cameron admitted that

Silent Hill - Out of all the video game movie adaptions, this is probably the only one I got any enjoyment out of for being a decent film. I'm a fan of the SH series, and my SO is a die hard fan. I'm not sure what Team Silent thought about it, but from a fan's perspective it was I'd say 50% close to the series material and 50% its own thing. Still, I wouldn't call it a must watch, and some things like Pyramid Head just showing up makes zero god damn sense (he has to do with James' psyche from SH2, why the fuck is he here?!). They mentioned some things like the cult, and the transitions between worlds, all that jazz. So I'll give them props, out of ALL the VG films I've seen, this is probably #1 for best adaption.

Max Payne - Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Ludacris, terrible action sequences, some really wtf camera angles, unmemorable garbage. No good vibrations here.

Street Fighter - This was Raúl Juliá's last movie role and it stares the ever so great Jean-Claude Van Damme. More people get shot in this movie then there is actual fighting. Besides some characters from the second game, it has NOTHING TO DO WITH THE GAME AND JEAN-CLAUDE IS UNBEARABLY BAD IN THIS. His war speech near the end ranks up there with the most unintentionally hilarious and bad speeches I've ever heard.

Tomb Raider - It has been a very, very long time since I saw this, so I can't really comment on it. I remember nothing about it, so I don't know what that says for the film.

Wing Commander - Lets put Freddie Prinze Jr., a terrible actor, and Matthew Lillard, an annoying, cringy actor together. Also, lets make the Kilrathi look like giant stupid puppets. Fill it up with shit special effects, nails on chalkboard dialogue, and scifi cliches. Good job guys, you made me want to consider wrapping my lips around the barrel of a shotgun.

A few VG movies I haven't seen include Hitman and the new Warcraft movie. So I can't comment on those, all I can say is video games don't translate to film because they are two completely different mediums. In a movie, you are a spectator along for the ride. Everything is tightly sequenced exactly how the director wants it. You see what they want you to see exactly. Ever play a CoD SP game and feel like you were really overly restricted in what you can do and where you can go? Yeah, it doesn't work the other way around either. Most movie based games suck for that exact reason too. The flow, the conveyance to the player, the action. It's usually dull or just plain garbage.

Movies have a different progression than video games. Video games can go all over the place, movies are a straight line. Video games can be hours upon hours long, dropping story and action and suspense and progression and exploration all over the place in those hours. Movies have a beginning, a middle and an end and usually don't go past an hour and a half. How do you condense all of that into an hour and still make it good and feel loyal to the game?

Good games are designed to be worlds the player feels like they're actually in and can explore. In video games, the player sees what they want to see, in good games anyways. CoD's design for example makes it feel like the developer is not very confident. They force you to see everything that goes on in the fear that you'll miss it. You are not the player in a video game, you are an actor in an interactive movie. You go where the dev wants you to go, everything is based around an air tight design. You can't open doors, you can't go back, your squad mates don't move forward until you do, the enemy will keep spawning in until you move forward. It's fucking garbage design.

Take a game like GTA 5 or the new DOOM, the developer is confident that cool thing he spent time on will be seen by enough people. He doesn't care if someone misses it. That adds value to finding it and seeing it. That makes the world feel more alive. The design is based around the fact that so much is going on, there are side areas, side quests, hidden areas, random NPCs... all of these things factor in to what makes some games what they are. You can't show that in movies.

Also take into consideration that story in video games often plays out DURING gameplay, when the player is doing what they want in the game world. How do you translate that to a film? Already that will create a disconnect I think between fans of the game and the movie. They might see something familiar in a movie but have very different memories of that moment in the game. Or the game's aspects might be warped in the movie, or just plain wrong.

Then, as mentioned above, a LOT of games are actually inspired by multiple movies. Why make a Max Payne movie? I agree with andysheets1975, go watch Hard Boiled! Why make a DOOM movies? Go watch Evil Dead, Aliens and Event Horizon. Also mentioned before, but face it, most video game stories are nothing special or groundbreaking at all, and there is probably a movie out there that does it already. What is most important in a movie? The story. The plot. The characters and their dialogue. What is most important in a video game? The game design. The mechanics. The level of polish, The responsiveness of the controls, the "game feel". So, that's why you see some bizarre shit in some VG movies. The director is trying to make it interesting to the non-fans by adding things and taking things away and modifying things. In the end it just warps it into something else.

The greatest example of this is the Mario movie. Just look at that fucking abomination, well that's because Mario is as bare bones as you can get in a game. Though honestly I'd argue that's just reason to not make it into a movie in the first place. But guess what? Mario was the mutt's nuts. All those kids would surely flood the theaters to see it.

Honestly, most directors behind these movies know that the title alone will bring in a large number of fans, so that's already guaranteed money. These movies will bring in lots of non-fans too and for them it probably doesn't really matter. My mom loves horror movies, doesn't touch video games, and really liked the Silent Hill movie for instance. She doesn't understand why I think it's nothing special.

Why are game movies horrible? For starters, you're taking a narrative delivered through a player-directed interactive medium, and turning it into narrative told through a player-passive non-interactive medium.

IMO audiences are going to prefer the former over the latter, especially the people who you'd be catering to with your video game movie: fans of the original source material. Sure, they may thought it was cute to include a first-person section in the Doom movie, but why on earth would you spend your time and money watching Doom, when you could be playing it instead, and having an arguably much better time doing it? The same could be said for the Prince of Persia movie, or the Tomb Raider movie.

This leads to the next major issue, IMO: structure. A lot of movies are structured around just retelling the story of the original game. A retelling may work for translating another medium that was non-interactive (a novel, a comic book, etc), but for a game? If you've already played through the game and experienced first hand all of the plot's twists and turns, why would you want to go through that again in a medium that loses out on the extra dimensionality of player involvement? IMHO, this was the problem faced with the Warcraft movie. I don't see any reason for me personally to watch a Warcraft movie when I've already played and re-played the first three games, especially when it's the first three games that form the basis for the movie's plot.

The best way I've seen so far to get around this issue is how the Halo live-action content did it: the Halo games have the benefit of having a very well fleshed-out, and richly detailed universe to use, with excellent world-building and lore to back it up. In addition to that, the Halo games also built up a very clear visual language: all you need to do is see a Pelican, Warthog or MA5B somewhere in the visual field to ground you in the universe. That means you can tell all kinds of different stories -- stories better suited for film or a miniseries -- without having to be tied down to yet another story about Master Chief that probably could have been done much better as a game.

For me personally, the best video game movie I've ever seen was Scott Pilgriim. Instead of taking a story originally meant to be delievered through player agency and forcing it to be told at us through tons of exposition, Scott Pilgrim told an original story using the visual language of video games.

I think these points incidentally also hold up for games that try to be movies. The only exception I can think of would be WC IV, and that was marketed as an "Interactive Movie" from the get-go.

In my opinion, the reason why many game movies fail is because, games often express the personalities of the games' characters during the actual gameplay (through the conversations taking place between the characters, the behaviors that the characters do in non-combat situations, etc.), rather than in/during cutscenes. This leaves many movie directors with the disadvantage of having to replace those important parts of the games' gameplays, with movie scenes that can act as substitutes with the same effect on the people who watch them (the game movies).

The Uncharted series and any other games similar to that will have higher chances of becoming good movies if it were to happen. Despite that, those higher chances are still close to half. This is because, even if those games have many interactive cutscenes (or just scenes if I may find a better way to put it), many, and I mean many, of the characters' conversations take place during the peaceful periods of the games (when the game characters are just walking around with no enemies on sight or nothing's going on, climbing and jumping over obstacles, etc.).

One thing to take note is that this is not the general reason for the question, as this reason doesn't apply to games such as Mortal Kombat, etc. You should know why if you try to compare the games I've mentioned with Mortal Kombat, or any other games similar to it.

It's normal.
Having no ammo against a boss can ruin the run, yep.
http://silenthill.wikia.com/wiki/Split_Worm

Adventure games are the only ones with story, and they never gets turned into movies.