MSN ran a piece this week arguing you should skip the new Street Fighter adaptation and watch five older video game movies that can't be beat instead, and it got me thinking about my own shelf. I'm not going to rehash their specific picks here, because the fun of lists like this is arguing with them anyway. Go read their roundup, then come back and fight me on mine.

The dirty secret of video game movies is that most of them fail for the same reason most licensed games failed in the '90s: nobody making them understood the source material, or worse, they were embarrassed by it. Remember the Super Mario Bros. movie from 1993? Bob Hoskins in a dystopia? That's what happens when a studio buys a property and then tries to make it into something else entirely. The good adaptations are the ones that respect what made the game work while still functioning as a movie.

So here are five that earned their spot, in my opinion, with no claims about what anybody else's list says.

Mortal Kombat (1995) understood the assignment before there was an assignment. Paul W.S. Anderson took a tournament fighter and made a tournament movie, kept the techno theme banging, and never once pretended he was above the material. Is it goofy? Sure. It's goofy in the same way the game was goofy, which is the point. I saw it in a theater full of teenagers screaming "Flawless Victory" and I promise you nobody in that room felt cheated.

Silent Hill (2006) is still the best direct translation of a game's atmosphere to film we've got. Christophe Gans recreated the fog, the rust, the air-raid siren dread so faithfully that watching it feels like playing the game with your hands off the controller. The script wobbles in the back half, but the craft in those first 40 minutes is real.

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) gets dismissed as a popcorn lark, and fine, it is one. But Angelina Jolie captured Lara's swagger in a way the games themselves were still fumbling toward in the PS1 era, and the movie made a fortune doing it. Sometimes "faithful" means nailing the attitude, not the level layout.

The Last of Us is the easy pick and the correct one. HBO took Naughty Dog's story and didn't dilute it, they expanded it. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey carried an adaptation that could have collapsed under the weight of fan expectations. It didn't.

Arcane rounds out my five. Riot and Fortiche turned a MOBA lore dump into some of the best animation on television. The painterly style, the way Jinx's arc actually earned its tragedy. Games have been trying to do what Arcane did with cutscenes since the FMV era, and it took a TV production to finally nail it.

Notice I cheated and included TV, because the line between "video game movie" and "video game adaptation" stopped mattering years ago. What all five of these share isn't budget or genre. Every one of them was made by people who understood the game well enough to know what to keep and what to cut, and knowing what to cut is the same trick a good remake pulls, whether it's Resident Evil 2 or any number of the retro revivals we keep getting handed lately.

Nina, my desk neighbor over in Gaming, keeps telling me adaptations are where series find new blood now instead of sequels. I used to argue. Lately I'm running out of counterpoints.

So before the new Street Fighter adaptation makes you nervous, run through the ones that worked. Have you rewatched the '95 Mortal Kombat lately? It holds up better than you remember.