I love video games and I love movies, so surely a book about the checkered production histories of some of these movies ought to be an entertaining read?

Unfortunately, quite the contrary - it ends up that the production histories of making these movies are rather boring.

We have inflated egos, conflicting visions and of course money issues at the heart of these productions, the kind of ingredients that never bode well for any artform.

A well-researched book on its subject matter, but more for superfans than the ordinary reader.

Deciding on the rating for this book was hard. I go with 3.5 and am conflicted as I write this. The problem is not how it's written or what it contains but what it is missing.
Light, Camera, Game Over! chronicles the history of video games being turned into movies. Research included interviews with cast and crew as well a look into the development process. It his many major movies starting with the mess that was Super Mario Brothers.
The book was entertaining and I loved learned about specific movies and learning what they did right or wrong. I loved how the author was passionate about video games and their movies. But I wasn't happy with the bias. Silent Hill is mentioned only a few times and usually in reference to how bad the author feels it was. The director loved the game and tried hard to stay true to the story and atmosphere while trying to balance a box office movie. This fact alone makes it an important entry in video game adaptations history as well as the fact that the movie contained a shot for shot remake of a scene from the game gives it a special place in video game history. (On a personal note, the first ,movie is one of my favorite adaptions. So there's my bias. lol)
You can also see how the author feels about the progression of the Resident Evil movies,. The entries about each movie gets shorter as he gets into more movies. The final movie doesn't even get more than a few paragraphs and I wanted to know more about that one. I guess he got bored writing about them because he got bored with the movies.
Luke Owen tries to be very professional with his writing which I like. It's not just a bunch of fan spewing. But it seemed to leave out some of the geekier facts. For example, in the Tomb Raider chapter, it only talked about the casting of Angelina Jolie and Daniel Craig and makes no mentioned of Iain Glen. who played the villain. The reason this matters at all is that Glen would then become a staple in the video game movie world as he became a villain in Resident Evil as well. Other actors such as Kim Coates are never mentioned even though they have worked on several adaptions. Luckily, Linden Ashby gets a mention for working with Paul W.S. Anderson again and that was a plus on his side. (Can you tell that video games movies are my thing? lol)
But the biggest oversight was that Final Fantasy Spirits Within was completely ignored. While not an adaption of a specific game, it was a movie that took the series to the big screen and then caused a lot of problems from the company. How this is left out in video game movies history and Pixels and Dead or Alive are deemed important enough for inclusion blows my mind. (In a nutshell Squaresoft made a film that was named Final Fantasy but didn't have any of the FF elements and that made everyone mad. The movie was a beautiful piece of CG work that bombed because fans were pissed off to the point that the company struggled finically).
I enjoyed this book, I really did, but like with many video games movie adaptions, I was left wanting more.