And why do you assume that 30-60 hour video game has to be condensed? 

Too many people are hung up on the mentality that the whole game has to go into one movie instead of "let's put as much as we can in the movie, wrap up the plot arc neatly, and prepare for the next one if it sells well."

First of all, it doesn't.  But second of all, nearly all the games which have become movies are actually gaming series, not just based on one game.  And to try to summarize, or even just remake hundreds of hours of gameplay and experiences into such a short time period (1-2 hours) is a daunting task that will hardly live up to anyones expectations. 

Pretty much you either have to go totally away from the source material and make a totally unique movie (like Resident Evil or Tomb Raider) or just make something that has a similar style and characters, but with such a condensed story that people feel it doesn't do the game series justice.  And this path usually also leads to tons of changes of the games key characters/storyline to make it work for the movies condensed script.

And then there's the little matter of trying to emulate the feeling of the original game in a live-action movie....

hmmmm, I havent actually seen the script.
you dont think a film in the mansion would have been better than the film that was made?

(I swear amnesia has to be the laziest way to introduce a character)

Relative to the movie that got made it sure was.

Why do people want game movies? The stories of games are usually the weakest part of the game. If the film uses a totally new adventure... then they may as well have just been a unique movie and not of a game. Game should stay games. We don't need good stories, it's about gameplay. Mario is a great example of this. That game series is still considered one of the all time best with a terrible story. Because it's FUN.

It's hard to adapt video games to movies because video games have horrible stories.

So a direct adaptation would be horrible... and if you change stuff people bitch that it's nothing like the game...

and honestly if you have a good enough story "rewrite" you should be able to get that to be it's own movie.

Totally agree (see my post).  Movies based on games are pure commercial affairs and money aside are just unecessary.

a lot of the time its the idea of character development tho, so to write a completely new story would be to write up some completely new characters and all that. someone might play a game and think "imagine if..." and think it makes a good story.

i hope thats how it works, anyway. i'd hate to think it was all marketability... *has faith*

And you've got to have faith.  Actually, having watched District 9, I did come out thinking that Jackson and Blomkamp could indeed have made a great movie based on Halo, and might actually have delivered the first decent game to movie film.  Pity it got canned.

On the whole, though, I would prefer people to make films to be good films, and not to try and leverage a game.  The simple fact is very, very few games really have a narrative worth putting in a film.

You might think a huge RPG has a huge narrative, for example, but it's all incident, when you boil it all down you have at best a slender narrative with characters who have limited depth and room for dramatic growth.

I think Deus Ex could backbone an interesting film, I'd love to see a something like Ico expanding into a lovely aminated film, but I think the focus will be on titles like Resident Evil, etc. which are C movies themselves so hardly the best starting point.

I will say though, that I would like to see a great film based on the basic characters and elements of Uncharted - that would work really well.  Of course, the game really aimed high for a solid B movie narrative with A movie production (like a certain Raiders of the Lost Ark) and it's inherently well set up to support a film as well.

Nathan Fillion even looks like Nathan Darke for pete's sake!

this is my point. do we want them to just port the story into a live-action portrayal of the game, or do we want them to write new stories, good stories that can be GOOD by themselves, just featuring/inspired by video game characters/plots etc?

(i just googled Nathan Fillion.. holy crap!!!)