Game: Predator (1987) - NES
Movie: Predator (1987)
The Movie: Early in Predator, a group of commandos are dropped off in the middle of the jungle to fight terrorists. Along the way, they find a group of Green Berets hung from the trees. Oh, and the fact that the Berets have all been skinned alive might have contributed to the movie's R-rating.
The terrorists end up causing them far fewer problems than the other inhabitant of the jungle, the Predator, who happens to be hanging out looking for things to kill. It kills the commandos one by one until there's just one left: Arnold Schwarzenegger. OK, the character's name is Dutch, but c'mon. Arnold battles the Predator in several scenes of intense violence and awesomeness. Eventually, he kills the dang thing and saves all the forest creatures. Just kidding, Arnie doesn't care about forest creatures. They all die.
The Game: It's again up to one-man-army Arnold Schwarzenegger to stop the alien. In case you don't know that it's Arnold, the game puts his name in the title screen because there's no way you'll be able to figure it out from the gameplay.
When the game starts, everyone but Arnie has already been killed by the Predator, and the last man standing seems to have forgotten to bring a gun with him on his trip to the jungle to fight terrorists - at least, we assume that's why he's there, if we're going by the plot of the movie. The game immediately starts the side-scrolling punch-fest - and hopefully starts you looking for a gun, too. To mellow things down a bit, scorpions and weird bubble things seem to be a bigger threat than the man-slaughtering alien, who supposedly destroyed Arnie's entire unit.
It's possible that Arnie eventually kills the Predator at the end of the game, but as far as we know, nobody ever got that far.
