Take, for instance, the Street Fighter movie. Widely denounced as a piece of garbage, it's one of those movies that hovers on the brink between Unremittingly Awful, and So Bad It's Good. Part of the reason for this is that the characters from the video game have the barest bones of personalities. When trying to write dialogue for these less-than-2D figures, one finds no grounding upon which to base intelligent speech. Their biographies served well enough when all they needed to do was differentiate one fighter from another; closer examination proves the lack of depth. Unfortunately, the writers (or, to be fair, the movie studio) failed to realize this and attempted to create a drama, when if they had truly understood the nature of the medium, a slapstick comedy would have succeeded supremely well. It's unlikely, however, that Capcom would have agreed to such a treatment, so we ended up with a property that already has one strike against it when the franchise reboot hits theaters in 2009.

Another part of the problem was the actual combat sequences. Listen, producers, if you're going to adapt the fast, furious, and frenetic gameplay battles into live-action scenes, you need to make it look better than what the game provides. In this case, that means superhuman, physics-defying feats of prowess that simply look silly when attempted by actual humans. Again, the problem here was the seriousness of it all; if everything had looked like Jackie Chan's City Hunter (which was itself an adaptation of a beloved anime), they could've had a hit on their hands.

This is not to say a good adaptation is impossible. When the Penny Arcade duo attempted to leverage their webcomic empire into creating their own PC game, they clearly understood the strengths and weaknesses of their brand. One of the better decisions to come out of that game was the use of text dialogue, rather than spoken. Quite aside from the fact that Gabe and Tycho are seen as avatars of Mike and Jerry, the two comic creators realized that in any medium where text is an important element, the readers provide the voices for the characters themselves. Any attempt to create a believable voice for any of the well-known personas would meet with incredulity.

Additionally, they also knew that they needed to be involved in the game's creation every step of the way. Mike handled the look and feel of everything from characters to environment, and Jerry wrote every last exhaustive bit of dialogue. They understood that their reputations were on the line, and that putting out a product that didn't "feel" definitively Penny Arcade would diminish the brand -- not that they'd have said it quite that way.