Are Videogames The New B Movies?

Peter Suderman speculates:

Absurd, mega-budget summer blockbusters like Transformers and G.I. Joe have siphoned off a lot of the energy that used to go into making moderately priced genre flicks, but recently, it’s struck me that another part of the equation is probably the emergence of scripted, action-movie style video games everything from the Halo games to Assassin’s Creed and Half-Life. I’ve been playing a lot of Killzone 2 this week which, by the way, I highly recommend and, in many ways, it’s really just an interactive B-movie. The scripted bits that carry along the in-game action consist almost exclusively of tough-guy cliches pieced together from the last forty years of action movies, comic books, and war films. It’s silly, outrageous, over-the-top, and incredibly entertaining just like a good B-movie should be.

And B-list actors are already getting the picture.