I’m a sucker for merchandising. Slap my favorite characters on some form of consumer good, and I’m going to buy it. This is really a problem when it comes to video games. I’ve bought some terrible TV-based games over the years. They’re not all terrible, of course. Some of the many Simpsons games have been pretty darn good, and there have been some fun games based on reality shows. Lost: Via Domus is halfway decent (background information about Radzinski and the early days of the Swan) and halfway terrible (the controls; crummy voice work that makes Locke sound line an old-timey prospector). But the games based on The Sopranos, 24, Alias, and many more have been lousy. Sometimes they’re just subpar games that only made it to stores because they called the main character “Jack Bauer”, and sometimes the developers clearly think that the recorded voices of James Gandolfini and Michael Imperioli will get us to buy a game with sluggish controls and poorly-conceived gameplay. And they’re at least partly right, because I keep buying ‘em.
