Wreck it Ralph: A video game movie that understands video games.

(Minor Spoilers)

Took long enough right? As gamers we've had to endure some pretty crappy movies, the ones we consider good still didn't even really understand anything about the games themselves. Game movies have often been about finding a game with a large fanbase and pumping out a shoddy film in the hopes of making a quick buck. Even more so video game movies just plain don't get made, every day you hear about some movie that's in development hell or stuck on hiatus.

Wreck-It-Ralph is doing it's absolute hardest to change this. Not only does this movie tell a genuinely good story but the amount of gamer in jokes and cameos(Including one....weird one) is staggering. It's also a pretty good look at the change that games have undergone in the last 30 years.

While older game movies would simply attempt to adapt thin stories into something that could be told in two hours, stretching thin plots, characters and action. Ralph instead tells it's own tale, a dejected classic game villain wishes to be accepted among the "good guys" after a comment from one of the npc's in his game he believes the only way to do this is to win a medal. To do this he leaves his own game and heads for something....a bit more modern.

Gears of......Call of.....I mean "Heroes Duty" while he's in this game you get a sense of the changing games message, while Ralphs game was a classic arcade game with cheery little music and a fun premise "Heroes Duty", the most modern game in the arcade, is full of loud dusbstep music, nonstop violence simplistic dialogue in a bleak landscape full of monstrous robots and characters with tragic backgrounds instead of the happy beginnings of classic games. The story evolves further from there and believe me when I say it's a very good one, good even if it wasn't based on video games.

Really it's the cameos and in jokes that make the movie, during the "game central station" sequence you can see a crazy amount of well know characters, from Sonic to Cammy it's crazy how many they packed into the small scenes not dedicated to the story(not to say Ralph doesn't come across plenty of cameos in his own adventure) The makers of this movie are clearly paying tribute to every game they can think of it in here(Including a few that little kids either can't or shouldn't get) from all areas of gaming, console and arcade alike. Old game movies simply wanted to please the fans of whatever game was popular at the time, usually failing miserably to accomplish even that. Ralph aims for a more cosmopolitan style, taking characters and elements from many games and using them to better itself rather than trying to blindly please a fan base.

Okay so this was sort of a roundabout way to tell you that you should see this movie. It's funny, it has a heart, and the people who made it clearly know their video games. It's finally a game movie for gamers.