If Lost fans got so upset at the shoehorning of the late, not-lamented Nikki and Paulo characters, they are unlikely to appreciate Elliott Maslow, another previously unseen passenger on Oceanic 815 and star of the first Lost videogame, Lost: Via Domus.

It’s a concern considering Ubisoft’s game is geared towards hardcore Losties, filled as it is with series arcana like Desmond’s snowman riddle, Charlie’s one-hit wonder and Walt’s Spanish comic book. It also curiously compresses the first season or so into a half-dozen hours of play, creating confusing timeline errors. But Maslow may be the real deal-breaker because Via Domus’ focus on his character means you’re stuck in the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern version of Lost, occasionally interacting with the main cast (some of whom do their own voice-work, too many of whom do not) while hovering around the periphery of their plot.

This side-story of an amnesiac photojournalist doesn’t add anything to Lost’s rich mythology. It’s fun to explore the show’s lushly recreated environs — beach camp, Dharma stations, pirate ship — and the game manages to work in the series’ flashback conceit. But how much more interesting could it have been if they’d take us somewhere new by setting the story pre-crash. We could’ve seen the Dharma Initiative in action, gleaned insight into The Others or even learned something about that enormous four-toed statue foot.

Ubisoft should’ve taken a lesson from the Buffy games. The 2002 Xbox original and its sequel Chaos Bleeds won critical raves. The stories were intriguing, the town of Sunnydale was wonderfully recreated and you got to play the main characters. Of course, it helps that the source material is rooted in combat and crazy-looking demons. 24: The Game also adapted easily into a stealth shooter game, which told a between-­season story that finally explained the dropped presidential poisoning subplot. It received mixed reviews, but they were still better than most TV-based games — Alias was a generic bore, Dukes of Hazard was undriveable, the arcade-y Battlestar Galactica was disappointingly simplistic and Pimp My Ride was even worse than you think.

One of the rare TV-to-console successes was last year’s The Simpsons Game. There have been umpteen games starring everyone’s favourite Springfieldians and most have been crap, but this first “next-gen” version finally had the graphical prowess to recreate the series’ animation — in fact, it looks better than the first couple of seasons. Countless hours could be spent wandering the painstakingly recreated town and interacting with pretty much every character from that famous yellow poster. You even get visit The Land of Chocolate!

But where it truly shined was its sharply satirical plot that mocked The Simpsons, videogames and past Simpsons videogames — plus hypocritical videogame critics, as Marge tries to ban Grand Theft Scratchy — and one of the big boss battles is against Matt Groening himself.

One of the reasons why licensed movie-based games are infamously lame is because they try to stretch a two-hour movie into a 20-odd hour game. So one would assume a TV series would be ideal for adaptation. After all, what are individual episode but game levels culminating in some big boss battle during sweeps week? Yet time and again, the attempts wind up as fan-service at best, lazy cash-ins for the rest. 

But the concept shows no sign of being cancelled. Last week came the announcement of a game based on acclaimed serial-killer-of-serial-killers series Dexter. The creators promise “the game designers, writers and artists are going to give Dexter’s morally complex world the kind of interactivity that gamers will love.”

And if not, well, then we just might have to kill them.