I'd say video game movies get a bad rap for being subpar cinema, but the honest truth is that video game movies are pretty goddamn awful most of the time. That reputation makes it hard to greet the .

But, true as that may be, it doesn't do much good to wallow in misery. We can spend our time lamenting the most rotten of the game movie crop, or we can turn away from the worst and focus on game-based films that are worth signing into Netflix over. Yes, I choose to be optimistic and think about the best video game feature films, even the ones that only made it to DVD. They aren't perfect, and they may make proper film buffs scoff, but each has a special something that makes microwaving another bag of popcorn worthwhile.

Comprised of a little-known cast, DOA: Dead or Alive wasn’t exactly set up for success. It was released straight-to-DVD in the United States, though it deserved a full theatrical release over some other video game adaptations (we’re looking at you, Dungeon Siege movie starring Jason Statham). The story's what you'd expect from a fighting game franchise: combatants from around the world are invited to participate in a secret martial arts tournament where things are not what they seem.

It's a weak premise to be sure, but DOA neither needs nor wants to be deep and affecting cinema. It's a pure popcorn flick from start to finish, with cheesy dialogue and exaggerated fight scenes that make for some stellar so-bad-it's-good comedy. Plus, the fact that allies can instantly become enemies if their names are drawn out of a figurative hat of death pumps some juice into an otherwise stale formula, and actually gives an explanation for why everyone in the DOA universe is constantly kicking the crap out of one another.

Max Payne is a movie that dreams of being Sin City when it grows up, from the neo-noir setting to its oppressive, shadowy visuals. You could say that much of that style comes from the Max Payne video games, but Max Payne the movie uses its roots as a segue rather than a foundation, turning it into a straight-up private-eye thriller.

Of course, losing the more game-centric aspects of Payne's vendetta means the film misses out on bullet-time physics and comic-inspired visuals, which is a big part of what made Max's exploits so good in the first place. The film's plot feels almost entirely removed from all by the basic parts of the Payne mythology, so there isn't much for fans here. Still, it latches onto the grittiness of Payne first and foremost, making it perfect if you're looking for a mystery marinating in dark action. But if that's your jam, make sure to grab a copy of the Unrated edition, as things were toned down for theatrical release - the exact opposite of what Max Payne should be.

If you’re dying for a movie that juxtaposes excellent fight choreography and flashy CG with Ben Kingsley sighing internally for 116 minutes, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time better be in your shopping cart of choice. A loose retelling of the first game, The Sands of Time is filled with great action sequences and expert use of special effects for the sands’ time-warping properties, both of which make up for its so-so storytelling.

The elephant in the room is that none of the actors for the main characters are Persian, and the whitewashed cast is definitely a distraction. Jake Gyllenhaal and Gemma Arterton's performances are decent enough though, with Gyllenhaal in particular channeling the Prince's struggles from Warrior Within and The Two Thrones into a faithful portrayal. Don't go in expecting Shakespeare, but if you're craving impressive fight scenes and sand-related magic, this won't be a waste of time.

The first in a series of films based on Capcom's seminal zombie franchise, Resident Evil is a fun horror flick that knows where to focus its energy. It doesn’t follow the story of the games, which can be impenetrable for non-fans, and would've been diminished if it was simplified for mainstream audiences anyway. Instead, RE follows new protagonist Alice (played by the lovely Milla Jovovich) and a group of Umbrella Corporation soldiers as they work to contain the outbreak of the T-Virus.

Alice’s main opposition isn’t the virus itself, but rather the AI with a doomsday protocol, using its automated systems to exterminate the virus by killing everyone inside. This tech makes for one of the best gore scenes in horror history, as characters are sliced and diced by malevolent machinery in a shower of gore. The plot gets squashed to make room for all that violence and action, and tends to drag when it does get attention, but if gratuitous gore and fantastic gunplay are all you care about, Alice is a worthwhile stand-in for RE's iconic, zombie-slaughtering protagonists.

It's Suicide Squad with an Arkham twist, dressed up like Batman: The Animated Series - and all of those things turn out just as good as they sound. Taking place two years before Arkham Asylum, Assault on Arkham focuses of the dysfunctional adventures of the Rogue Gallery's pinch hitters as they're forced to break into Arkham on the orders of Amanda Walker. Like I said, it's with a few different faces.

Even if you haven't played the games (or scored every Riddler trophy), Assault on Arkham can stand on its own, with the sort of impressive animation and framing that's characterized most of DC's animated features in recent years. That said, it's heavy on fan service and light on explanation, so if you walk into this one with no Batman knowledge you're going to come out very confused. But for a film aimed squarely at building another piece of the Batman mythos into the Arkham series, Assault on Arkham it gets the job done by any means necessary (which includes exploding heads).

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider was right to put Lara's name first, because that's what the movie's really about: the spelunking heroine of video game legend. Angelina Jolie is the perfect actress to fill Lara's combat boots, and her action hero chops have made her virtually inseparable from old-school Lara in the minds of many moviegoers. Tomb Raider is an action-packed popcorn flick through and through, with excellent choreography and magnificently ridiculous fight sequences; Jolie's performance is the hot, buttery magic on top.

That doesn't translate to Tomb Raider being a good movie - the story is bare-bones at best, and when the movie does attempt to foster an emotional core through Lara's feelings about her dead father, it's painful in all the wrong ways. But don't worry about that - Lara just sliced a robot open with its own blade arms and popped her party mix into its disc drive, and you don't want to miss another second.

Before taking the helm on the Resident Evil movies, Paul W.S. Anderson directed Mortal Kombat, one of the first video game movies that managed to appeal to a mainstream audience while faithfully adhering to its source material. The film follows the saga started by the evil Shang Tsung and his plot to destroy Earthrealm (i.e. Earth); the exaggerated fight moves of Johnny Cage, Sonya Blade, and Liu Kang are the only thing that can stop him. It's incredibly cheesy in proper early '90s fashion (with all the bad hair and leather to boot), but commits to the premise so sincerely that it's hard not to love.

The quirky nature of the film fits right in with the characters themselves, who are constantly cracking jokes and switching between increasingly ridiculous outfits. Its fight scenes are genuinely exciting, made even better by regular overacting, and both capture the spirit of Mortal Kombat even without the gut-churning Fatalities. While Hollywood tried to bottle lightning again in Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, it lacked the goofy soul it needed to succeed. In a battle between the two, the original Mortal Kombat scores a flawless victory.

Capturing the scale of Bayonetta's battles is hard to do on film, and Bayonetta: Bloody Fate never really gets there. Even though it's replete with explosive battles and outrageously campy action, the anime interpretation it feels toned down in comparison to the game, with a lot of stylized close-ups and music that has nowhere near the peppiness of . But as different as Bloody Fate might feel from its source material, it's still good enough to stand on its own, and that's not half bad for a video game film.

Through gorgeous animation that uses its bold color scheme as a storytelling tool, Bloody Fate recounts a simplified version of Bayonetta's tale, which is easier to make sense of when it's actually explained. Unlike other game adaptations that demand a thorough understanding of the original game from the start, Bloody Fate is a workable stand-in for the original game. You won't have to know anything about the seductive witch ahead of time to get the jist of what's happening, letting you enjoy the gleeful carnage on its own, beautifully rendered merits. Now if only they'd they'd give Bayonetta 2 the same treatment (no Wii U necessary).

Advent Children is the ultimate in fan service, and it's not sorry. The impatiently awaited sequel to Final Fantasy 7, Advent Children comes bearing a plot that you need , some diagrams, and a ton of red string to properly understand. Yet its stellar cinematography makes much of its narrative incoherence forgivable, and once you actually sort out what's happening, it's the perfect story for those in need of an FF7 fix.

Here are the broad strokes: two years after the end of FF7, three Sephiroth clones show up and start all sorts of trouble, so the gang has to get back together to stop them (and help Cloud get over his re-emerging survivor's guilt over Aerith's death). That's about all the explanation the movie offers up, which leads to a lot of head-scratching moments when the characters' motivations don't stretch farther than the next fight scene. But man are those fight scenes amazing: varied and gorgeous enough to stay interesting despite their frequency, with bits of character development in between that'll leave any FF7's fan's heart a-pattering. Dress it up with full CG that still look fantastic ten years later, and you've got a solid gift for the fans that doesn't need to make sense to be enjoyable.

Striking a balance between loyalty to the source material, mass appeal, and good filmmaking is biggest hurdle for any video game movie, and very few manage to keep one aspect from overwhelming the others. Silent Hill isn't perfect in that regard (it’s no stranger to cheap horror gimmicks and clichés, for instance), but it's gotten closer than any other game movie to date. It takes what made Silent Hill so terrifying in the first place and captures it on film, feeding off that same fear that made the game successful so many years before.

Reimagining the story of Silent Hill with a female lead named Rose, the Silent Hill movie pulls from the game's otherworldly horror for its visuals and iconography, incorporating series touchstones like the cultish Order, psychic child Alyssa Gillespie, and nightmarish monsters at every turn (including Pyramid Head in one of the movie's best scenes). Most importantly, it doesn't shy away from the grotesque imagery that makes Silent Hill so affecting, so you never get the sense that it's been sanitized for Hollywood. It even takes things a bit too far at the end, so get ready to cover your eyes.

What do Hollywood blockbusters have in common with the number 35 bus? Why, that's easy - you wait an absolute age for one, only for two to turn up at once. Take Armageddon for instance - aka the movie in which Steve Buscemi was exposed to the harsh vacuum of space... no wait, I'm now being told that he looked like that already. Sorry Steve… Simply put, Armageddon was all about asteroids crashing into the earth. So, a lot like that other movie from 1998 - Deep Impact. Coincidence? Guess again chums, because these two twins were far from unique. Consider 2014's Hercules vs The Legend of Hercules or Iron Eagle vs Top Gun. How about Olympus Has Fallen vs White House Down? The list goes on.

Indeed, cinematic history is packed tight with examples of oddly analogous movies. But what about gaming? Does the interactive medium boast its fair share of twinned features too? Well let's bloody well hope so - It's going to be an awfully short feature otherwise…

Criteria check - To avoid unnecessary confusion over release dates I'm only going to including US release dates.

Superheroes and sandbox games go together like Gwen Stacy and gravity. When a major player opts to drop one, you'd better believe it's going to be memorable. One part urban strife, six parts spandex - a winning combo by any estimation. Sadly, precious few of these titles actually exist - something to do with the inherent difficulty of coding up 'two' titles at once. A solid superhero game and a sprawling cityscape? One alone should be enough to drive most developers to drink.

Then there's Infamous and Prototype, two games that dared to make good on the promise of that premise. Both titles starred reluctant everymen receiving outrageous new abilities. From there players were encouraged to either go good or be bad - to fight crime or to fuel it. Though broadly similar, both efforts remained different enough to warrant a double dip. That is until they made the mistake of launching some two weeks apart. Perhaps it's only proper that these two superheroes duked it out directly, though it couldn't have done either game's sales a world of good.

I'll wager there were more groans than at a disappointing orgy the day these two titles first caught wind of one another. Just think of it - one second you're riding high, confident of a unique concept, the next you're reading up on some accidental doppelganger. I suppose it's faintly absurd that two titles based around psychic powers couldn't perceive the other one coming. So much for their vaunted foresight...

With scarcely 10 weeks between releases, Psi-Ops and Second Sight effectively trod on one another's toes. Both had attempted to inject some much-needed variety into the veritable scrum of 3rd person shooters. Sadly, their too-close proximity would quickly put paid to that - making both efforts seem now newly unoriginal.

Attempting to differentiate your game is a tough old ask even at the best of times. Fans and critics alike essentially crave a good frame of reference, be it a basic genre tag or a more specific comparison. "It's a bit like this", or "a whole lot of that" can express in mere seconds what might otherwise take aeons to describe. Now imagine that you're marketing a driving title. Real cars on realistic tracks, all bombing it around at ridiculous speeds. Fun yes, though not exactly varied.

Wisely, both Blur and Split/Second attempted to surmount these issues through the use of nifty gimmicks. The former went all RL Mario Kart - boasting 'car-based combat for grownups', while the latter prized raceway destruction on an enormous scale. Good start. Now if only they hadn't released one week apart and stolen each other's thunder. Every last forking bit of it.

Talk about a pair of heavy hitters. In the red corner, one hotly anticipated sequel to the biggest MMO going. And in the blue, all the might of the Warcraft franchise brought to bear on a burgeoning genre. If ever there was a time to stop WoW from achieving its world domination, then this surely was it. Killed in its infancy, like some sort of mad sci-fi plot to assassinate the Baby Hitler.

The biggest name in MMOs vs the genre's heir apparent. Going toe to toe, with barely two weeks between them. You might say that the stakes were even higher than a spectator at a Columbian forest fire, and you’d be right. Both games were good - damn good in fact, each one deserving its fair share of the MMO userbase. The fact that Warcraft was able to not only best its rival in 'single combat', but also claim the vast share of subscribers only adds to considerable legend.

Mooching off the movies is a well-established pattern amongst video game developers. Just look at the likes of Contra, a game that disguised its obvious nods/ bloody-minded plagiarism about as well as a knock-off Chinese Disneyland. Oftentimes, tracing the root of these trends is easy enough. After all, Contra appeared just 8 months later than Jim Cameron's Aliens. Coincidence? I think not.

Then there are games like Arabian Magic and Arabian Fight, a pair of solid arcade brawlers bearing eerily similar settings. So, where on earth did their developers get the idea to look to the Middle East - a largely untapped creative avenue, outside of the modern military shooter? Why, that's simple, you say - Disney's Aladdin appeared in the very same year! Except of course that Aladdin hit cinemas after both titles had already debuted. So, either someone smelled money in those early trailers, or three independent studios (including Disney) all decided 1992 was to be the year of Turkish trousers.

Not a release date this time, but a shared announcement phase. Both Elite: Dangerous and Star Citizen opted to take their projects public within just seven weeks of one another. So far, so standard - or so you may think - but what exactly do these intrepid explorers have in common? Well for starters, both games have taken a long dormant genre, i.e. the spaceflight sim and recreated it in MMO form. On top of that, both titles were successfully kickstarted into being, all whilst handily exceeding their original funding targets.

Then there are the creative minds involved. Star Citizen's Chris Roberts created the much-loved Wing Commander series, while Elite's David Braben is practically responsible for the entire genre. So, to recap - that's two giants of the genre, two big-time comebacks and two parallel crowd funding campaigns all unveiled within two months of one another. Too sweet.

Much like the aforementioned Blur and Split/Second, both of these titles bet big on a flashy new gimmick. Call it 'car driving for the social networking age'. Sadly, neither title could quite outdistance the other, running so close together as to create a veritable car crash of confused gamers. In addition, both titles suffered from various network-related glitches, issues that would eventually contribute to a lukewarm critical appraisal.

Despite all this, both games would go on to sell some 2 million copies apiece, not bad at all, especially when you consider that Drive Club only appeared on the PlayStation 4 format.

Two major players both launching within a month of each other? Sounds like franchise suicide. After all, somebody's got to lose. "I know - you'll be Betamax and I'll be VHS. No no no, you be HD DVD and I'll be Blu Ray". At least, that's how you might expect events to unravel. In the case of Unreal Tournament vs. Quake III Arena, neither party saw fit to suffer such a mortal injury. Instead, both games would go on to receive a slew of successful sequels.

It's a bit like that one movie Twins, except in this instance both men grew up to be the Arnold Schwarzanegger variety. So, it's actually a lot like The 6th Day, in which Arnie grows himself a clone. No wait, it's might be more like Junior, wherein the Austrian Oak births himself an Arnie baby. Wait… what was I talking about? Oh right, madcap multiplayer shooters. I suppose it's rather ironic that of all the entries on this list, the genre with the most gun happy patrons should agree to live and let live. I guess this town really is big enough for the both of us.

Now, here's an entry you couldn’t have seen coming… I'll bet it really snuck up on you… You might even say that it quietly approached in the dead of night before violently opening your throat. No, wait - that last one doesn't work. But enough hilarity for one moment, let's get back to business. What is it exactly that makes these two titles - set some 500-odd years apart - so similar as to be counted as 'twin releases'?

Well, if we're talking broad strokes here, then plenty. Both Tenchu and Metal Gear Solid marked a brave new foray into the world of 3D stealth-em-ups. Sure, the latter title may have had a solid 2D pedigree behind it, but the genre itself had never really gained any mainstream attention. These are the games that helped change that, debuting within a mere two months of one another. Moreover, the equally important Thief series also launched at around this time, solidifying a whole new genre in the space of around 12 weeks. Not bad.

It's not every day that an uber violent homage to the 1980s appears. Well, unless that day just so happened to occur within the month of October, 2012. Released within two weeks of one another, Retro City Rampage and Hotline Miami might well have contended for the crown of most 'pixellated blood bath'. Instead Hotline met with enthusiastic reviews, whilst Rampage could only muster up a string of middling appraisals.

A more fitting scrap might've seen the two titles donning animal masks, nabbing a pair of DeLoreans and jousting it out on the sunset strip. A man can dream, cant he? *sigh*