Since no one likes beating a dead horse more than me, I'm going to continue arguing my case to stop movies being made into games and vice versa.

Due to bad planning, and also my brother being a fink and stealing the car, I ended up spending last night at home. Normally during this time of year I'd catch an NBA playoff game, but the Cavs game was over, and the most boring team is basketball, the San Antonio Spurs, was forcing my beloved Mavericks to play a slow paced, half-court, narcolepsy inducing game. Having been abandoned by my two typical means of evening entertainment, I decided to take a jaunt through my video game collection and see what grabbed me. I ended up popping The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction into my Xbox, and I managed to finish the game in a few hours. I'm convinced it's one of if not the greatest superhero games ever.

What especially impressed me about Ultimate Destruction was how it would make a terrible movie. In no particular order, the things that really appealed to me about the game were:

- More or less everything can be destroyed or deformed in one form on another. Hulk can level buildings, crush cars, crack pavement and shatter towers of rock. After some of the more intense battles, the surrounding cityscape will look like a war zone. The sometimes astounding destructibility of the environments really lends a sense of spectacle and wonder to the fights. It's just plain fun to pick up a Hulk-sized opponent, feed him a few shots with Hulk's right hand, and fling him into a gas station then watch the building collapse. As an aside, if Company of Heroes ends up providing the kind of dynamic destruction it promises, I may never leave my house again once its released.

- The GTA-style free roaming game play really contributes to the sense of being a superhero you get from the game. The basic rule of thumb is that if you can see it, you can go there. There's something inherently appealing in being able to leap from skyscraper to skyscraper until reaching a bridge, then landing on said bridge and smacking some sense into the cars driving on it.

- The boss battles are simply epic. Hulk fights a wide variety of very powerful foes, and almost all of the encounters (barring the last couple) are memorable. My personal favorite is the showdown with General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross. Ross fights in this huge Hulkbuster mech that's easily thirty times Hulk's size. By the time I was done with him, the section of city we were fighting in looked like it had been bombed to pieces by the RAF. Most of the buildings were flattened, shattered tanks littered the ground like so much garbage, and everything was on fire.

- While manipulating the Hulk, you feel like well, the Hulk. He takes a serious lickin' and keeps on tickin'. He can jump to ridiculous heights, catch missiles with his bare hands, toss tanks around like a kid playing with Hot Wheels and sprint at around 60 clicks an hour. He is, after all, the strongest superhero in the world, so it makes sense that you'd get a real sense of power from playing as him

- Also, Bruce Banner is nowhere to be seen outside of cut scenes. Anyone who played the Hulk movie tie-in game knows why this is possibly the greatest feature the game offers.

It should come as no surprise that most of this stuff would make a terrible movie. Think about it – the main character is more or less invincible, he never talks outside of various grunts and yells, and he spends upwards of 90% if his screen-time smashing shit, which would get pretty boring after the first hour or so. The appeal of Ultimate Destruction stems from features which would translate horribly on to the silver screen. Yet its source material, the Hulk universe, comes from a different medium entirely – comic books.

Why is it that a comic book to video game translation can work out great, but movies that become games are usually uglier than Sam Cassell? Of the top of my head, I'm not quite sure. I seem to have written myself into a corner. Well, this is all I've got time for now, so I guess I'll have to draw this rant out a little bit more. I would be worried about losing readers because of this, but luckily I don't have any.