Movie-licensed games tend to be pretty dire.

Most people make an exception. They say “Movie games are crap… except Goldeneye, of course.”

And that is fair, because Goldeneye was a fine game.

Personally, I would add the “Batman” game for the Genesis to the list of Movie Games That Aren’t Crap, but moving on…

A few years ago, people started saying “except Goldeneye and Riddick, of course.”

And I had a bit of a hard time swallowing that. I don’t know why, it just seemed really unlikely.

However, I am always willing to give something a fair chance, so I picked up a used copy of the Xbox version of The Chronicles of Riddick from Gamestop for the princely sum of $4.50 and put it on the shelf where it remained unplayed for some while.

Then I saw multiple references to the PC version looking really quite nice, so I spent another $10 to get The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay : Developer’s Cut. I installed this and it refused to run, which is one of the drawbacks of PC gaming – I needed a patch, and Sierra no longer made the patch available on their web site.

Poking around the web scored me the patch, and then I put the game aside for a few months, until after I’d finished Prince of Persia and wanted a bit of a change.

I can report that the PC version does indeed look brilliant. The world it’s depicting is rather nasty and not pleasant to look at… but it looks damned good even when you don’t really want to be looking at what you’re looking at. It also supports 1680 x 1050 resolutions right off the bat and even works quite well with a gamepad, which I didn’t expect from a PC title. I had to go into the configuration and tell it that I wanted to move with the left thumbstick and aim with the right… but once that was sorted it was, well, pretty much like playing a console title.

And yes, as far as movie licensed games go, it’s pretty darn good. The middle bit of the game, where you’re running around some mines with virtually no way to defend yourself and getting shot a bunch, does drag on a bit, but once you get past that you get some real payoff.

I understand they’re remaking it for the current generation of consoles, and this is why the Xbox version isn’t backwards compatible, but if you have any kind of recently-built PC I don’t see why you wouldn’t play it on that instead.