The Mating of Movies and Video Games; a Dumpster Baby in the Making

It is not uncommon these days to hear about a wonderful movie in the works based on one of our favorite video game franchises. Replace the word “wonderful” with “terrible” and it should land you in the realm of precision missile accuracy. When did movie bigwigs and supposed marketing know-it-alls start thinking that movies based on video games or vice versa was a good idea?

This form of “entertainment” is nothing new starting with Street Fighter back in 1994, the film that simultaneously popularized the idea and killed Raul Julia at the same time. Over the past few years we have been increasingly subjected to the whims of these madmen directors, who are in more dire need of being sexed up by a gorilla than receiving anymore script approvals.

Take for instance the infamous Uwe Boll, director of such marvelous gems like House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, and Bloodrayne. Films which have graced our televisions and movie theatres and left us wondering one thing; in God’s name why? These films and many others like them have the staying power of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in a female depression clinic but no one is taking the hint.

Here I sit on April 5, 2008 and I just found out about a Halo and a Gears of War film in the works but these games have about as much film potential and plot intricacy as World of Warcraft Nerds Gone Wild. I also found out about a Max Payne flick which I was moderately interested in since the series had an amazing story until I learned Mark Wahlberg and Chris O’Donnell have leading roles and I died a little inside.

Now I’m not saying that all game to movie adaptations are bad, there were a few breaths of fresh air in the endless choking fog of terrible films. The first Mortal Kombat film was possibly the best, I use that term loosely of course, and perhaps Advent Children comes second. After that your chances of finding another movie of the same quality are slim.

I have no urge or desire to see any of my favorite games wind up on the big screen. I don’t think Half Life, Metal Gear Solid, or Bioshock will be awe-inspiring films worthy of any praise unlike the games they were based on. There is far too much lost in the translation to justify creation of films like this; the fan base is usually alienated since the plot doesn’t stay true to the source material, the story we are given appears to have been retrieved from the director’s cesspool, and what we’re left with is a doorway into the mind of someone who is slightly less intelligent than a rock. The door swings both ways these days though and some higher-ups in all their wisdom have decided to make movies the butch in this relationship and video games their … well you get the point.

Like their distant cousins, games based on films generally don’t work either. Again, there are a few notable exceptions like Escape from Butcher Bay and Star Wars: Republic Commando but the rest follow your typical downward spiral of crappiness. When I’m not gouging my eyes out after playing a healthful dose of a Braveheart strategy game similar to the Total War series, I’m trying my best to purposefully miss that key web on the skyscraper so Peter Parker plummets to his death.

To quote Secret of Mana, “Time flows like a river, and history repeats itself.” I wish directors and game developers alike learned this little truism and stopped creating this garbage.

MK vs. DCU – Don’t make me laugh!

Appears in The Whit on April 24, 2008.

About another year has passed and it’s time once again for Midway Gamers’ Day in good ol’ Sin City. Every year Midway drops bombshells, announces new projects, and allows attendees to get their eager hands on the latest builds for upcoming games. This year is no different and yet again Midway wows press and gamer alike but this time with a fresh helping of “WTF” courtesy of Mortal Kombat vs. DC.

The only conclusion I can reach is that Ed Boon, who is the co-creator of the Mortal Kombat (MK) franchise along with this little gem, was high when he gave the colorful Powerpoint presentation to sell this “great” idea to all the Midway execs. MK vs. DCU reminds me of one of those “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” ideas that sixth graders come up with around the cafeteria table while eating overcooked burgers and drinking sour 2% milk. Originally thought to be good ideas at the time quickly degenerate into “What was I thinking?” upon reflection several days later.

So here we have staple MK characters such as Liu Kang, Scorpion, and Sub Zero going toe-to-toe with the likes of Superman, Batman, and Aquaman which totally makes sense. Granted, I’ve desperately wanted to see Aquaman get his ass handed to him in general but the pairing here just doesn’t fit. It’s like mixing Lucky Charms with Banana Nut Crunch, they may both be cereals but that is where the similarities end and I don’t think it would taste any good either.

Diehard MK fans will be pleased to know that there will not be any fatalities but fatality-like finishing moves. Basically we get some lame body slam or a punch to the gonads in true Johnny Cage Block + Low Punch style instead of an epic move of gory showmanship. In a recent interview with Boon, he explains we won’t be seeing hearts and spines ripped out by Superman or Batman and that sucks. To me this game feels like a DCU fighting game with MK characters thrown into the grinder for good measure because without fatalities, gore and massive pools of blood it’s not MK. MK vs. DCU will also ship with a T rating which is an MK first, for shame.

Despite my opinions, I’ll admit that the new directions the devs are taking are fairly intriguing. Dubbed the “clean slate” approach by Boon and his cohorts, everything we know about the MK fighting system will receive a total revamp. The weapon and multiple fighting style systems we’ve gotten used to throughout the past few MK games will get the boot and a more brutal, visceral approach gets the nod. Don’t ask me how they’ll do it; I thought impaling someone with a sword was brutal enough.

Also new on the table are three different battle modes called Klose Kombat, Freefall Kombat, and stage interaction. In Klose Kombat the camera zooms in on the action and the player who initiated the mode gets to throw the punches while the poor sap with slower reaction time is on the defensive dodging blows or taking them like a man. Freefall Kombat comes into play when you or your opponents are thrown off a very tall level. When this occurs, you won’t watch the character plummet to their death but you’ll jump with him and battle in mid-air. Stage interaction is just how it sounds. You can throw your enemy into walls, buildings or pick up random objects and have a good ol’ fashioned melee.

Will this game be a success? It may do well financially because it carries the MK and DCU logo all in one package but in regards to quality, we’ll just have to wait and see. Despite the odd backstory and removal of fatalities and extensive gore, I’m intrigued to see what Boon can cook up. My only hope is that other companies don’t try to fit mismatched pairs and make Dragon Ball Z vs. Naruto, Halo vs. Gordon Freeman, or Jesus vs. Satan, although that last one would be pretty cool.

The rantings of a madman?

I will say first and foremost that Kevorkian’s book was one helluva interesting read. Whether there is any truth to his ideas makes for an intriguing debate. HOWEVER, I will not sit here and say that everything he says is an outright lie. I do not know what it feels like to be persecuted because of my color so it would be inconceivable to believe what Kevorkian discusses never happens.

I don’t want to write all of my arguments here since I want to bring them up in class but I will say Kervorkian might be going a tad far.

NPD says 72% of Americans play video games

An interesting article found here

And evidence revealed to counter the old and tired PC Gaming is Dying argument.

Gamers Rejoice Jack Thompson is no more

Appears in The Whit on March 27, 2008

Any gamer worth their salt knows all about Jack Thompson and his advocacy to ban violent video games, citing the supposed connection between violence in video games, or “murder simulators” as he likes to call them, to violence in real life. His fearmongering, baseless criticism, and outlandish behavior have plagued the industry for years but there may finally be an end in sight.

On March 20, the Florida Supreme Court finally issued sanctions against Thompson after a month of deliberation. This came as a result of a show cause order issued last month where the courts demanded that Thompson “show cause on or before March 5, 2008, why this Court should not find that you have abused the legal system process.” Obviously Thompson’s rebuttal didn’t have any effect on the collective minds of the court.

The ruling means that the court will no longer accept anything from the man unless it is through another lawyer. Judging by how terrible his reputation has become over the years, I doubt any lawyer would want to sully their name by siding with him.

Thompson has been on a long road since he first represented the parents of three teenagers killed in the Heath High School Shooting back in 1999, claiming computer games were the catalyst for then 14-year-old Michael Carneal’s shooting spree on the morning of Dec. 1, 1997.

What followed was a path littered with controversy ranging from filing picture books as documents to including gay pornography into the court filing, issues which caused the show cause order to begin with.

One of his most notorious acts was his open letter sent on Oct. 10, 2005 to several members of the press and Doug Lowenstein, the president of Entertainment Software Association (ESA) titled, “A Modest Video Game Proposal.” In the letter, Thompson explains that he will donate $10,000 to any charity designated by Take-Two Interactive CEO Paul Eibeler if a game was created, marketed, and sold based on a scenario of his design.

The scenario features a protagonist named Osaki Kim, a father who lost a son, who was beaten to death with a bat by a 14-year-old gamer who played a game about beating people with bats. Kim vows for revenge and goes on a killing spree murdering video game developers, company CEOs, and then heads to E3 to off industry execs in “one final, monstrously delicious rampage.”

As a result of the month-long proceedings, Thompson’s behavior has taken an obvious turn for the worse. Earlier this month, Thompson submitted a near-bomb threat to the Florida Supreme Court. In the letter, Thompson submitted a picture of an old, bombed-out building and wrote, “Below is what the Florida Bar will look like if [the Florida Supreme] court acts affirmatively on its show cause order, figuratively speaking, of course.” Thompson’s craziness doesn’t stop there either.

Just last week during an interview with Jim Sterling, a writer for destructoid.com, Thompson said, “Why don’t you just molest children directly rather than through Rockstar. It would be more personal that way,” when referring to the lifted ban on the Manhunt 2 game.

Despite the sanctions, Thompson can continue to practice law in the state of Florida if he chooses to do so. However, Thompson faces disbarment if the ruling of the nine-day professional misconduct trial that occurred late last year doesn’t fall in his favor. Judge Dava Tunis, who is presiding over the case, will make her ruling next month.

I doubt this will be the last we see of dear ol’ Jack Thompson but until then, cheerio!

Damn you open area!

Any word as to why Neptune is down and when it will be back up? I want to upload this midterm.

Questions on Jew’s Daughter and Unknown Hypertext

Both Unknown Hypertext and The Jew’s Daughter are considered to be hypertext fiction which, according to Wikipedia, “is a genre of electronic literature, characterized by the use of hypertext links which provides a new context for non-linearity in “literature” and reader interaction. The reader typically chooses links to move from one node of text to the next, and in this fashion arranges a story from a deeper pool of potential stories.”

 
1. Knowing this, do you feel you would have enjoyed these stories if they were in a regular, linear format or did this prove more enjoyable because you could choose (in Unknown’s case) where you wanted to go?

 
2. It is obvious how Unknown Hypertext can be interesting since each page can have so many different links but what about The Jew’s Daughter? You can’t really go anywhere except where it tells you to making it much more restrictive. What advantages, if any, could you see from creating hypertext fiction in this fashion other than confusing the hell out of the people who read it?

 
3. When I first looked at Unknown Hypertext, it reminded me how websites used to look back when the Internet was first being used. Simple layouts littered with hundreds of links to other places. What did this website remind you of?

 
4. Do you think that these websites might be the future of literature over the internet or do you think people will continue to prefer the linear form?

 
5. Why do you think someone would go through the trouble of creating a website like The Jew’s Daughter? What purpose do you think it serves?

Hilarious video about every famous website at a party

Enjoy, oh and not for kids.

Co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax, dies

Will appear in the Whit on March 6, 2008.

Originally I had an article lined up about the Game Developers Conference that took place in recent weeks but upon hearing the grave news of Gary Gygax’s death, I knew that he needed to be written about. He deserves center stage because his passing is more important than 50 conferences combined and felt by millions across the world.

As the co-creator of the world famous Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) tabletop game, Gygax’s contributions to the gaming world are vast, numerous, and immense. Gygax had an unfathomable love for games. Without D&D we wouldn’t know what a role-playing game is, hell, the entire RPG industry wouldn’t have existed either. The term “fantasy world” would be something we would only see in our dreams or read about in books by authors like J.R.R Tolkien. Author of dozens of books and creator of a multitude of games, the industry has lost one of its best and most influential.

Created in 1974 by Gygax and friend Dave Arneson, D&D allows its players to create unique characters like a human mage or dwarf warrior and have them travel on imaginary adventures to various locales like dungeons, castles and other places based within a fantasy setting. The results of choices characters make in the game and the storyline arc is determined by the Dungeon Master, who basically runs the whole game. The game is also played according to the DM’s interpretation of the game rules. “The essence of a role-playing game is that it is a group, cooperative experience,” said Gygax in an interview in 2006. “There is no winning or losing, but rather the value is in the experience of imagining yourself as a character in whatever genre you’re involved in, whether it’s a fantasy game, the Wild West, secret agents or whatever else. You get to sort of vicariously experience those things.”

Since its release all those decades ago, D&D has taken the world by storm. According to a recent article by The New York Times, D&D has garnered an estimated $1 billion through books and equipment and over 20 million people have partaken in the D&D experience. D&D is also responsible for countless spin-offs in both the tabletop RPG and computer RPG realms as well. Companies like White Wolf Inc., creator of the famous Vampire: The Masquerade RPG, and Black Isle Studios, responsible for games like Planescape: Torment and the Baldur’s Gate series, pay homage to D&D and Gygax because if it wasn’t for him, they wouldn’t have existed.

In 1967, Gygax organized a 20-person gaming meet in the basement of his home which later became known as “Gen Con 0” and it is where he met Arneson and Brian Blume, a future partner of his company Tactical Studies Rules. This meeting would eventually become the Gen Con gaming convention, the world’s largest annual hobby-game gathering.

Gygax died the morning of Tuesday, March 4 at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. He was 69 and died due to an abdominal aneurysm. Gygax leaves behind six children, seven grandchildren, countless friends and his wife, Gail Carpenter.

“I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else.”

Farewell and safe travels Mr. Gygax, we will miss you.

Game Developers Conference Wrap-up

            Another year has passed and another chance at juicy gaming news and inside information has come and gone. No I’m not talking about E3, I’m talking about the Game Developers Conference or GDC for those familiar with the event. This year’s GDC took place on February 18 – 22 and it turned out to have the biggest attendance ever, boasting over 18,000 people coming to see the show and I doubt any left disappointed.

Every year GDC is jam-packed with information, sneak peeks and game developers discussing a multitude of topics and this year’s was no different. Gamers had the opportunity to see famous keynote speakers talk about their games and the industry itself such as Dave Jones, creator of Crackdown and the famous (or infamous depending on your opinion) GTA series, Peter Molyenux, creator of Fable, and even Ralph H. Baer, dubbed the “Father of Video Games” by the industry for creating the first commercialized video game system, the Magnavox Odyssey.

The sheer amount of information that was unveiled this year was staggering. Games were showcased, release dates were announced, and sequels were discussed. The GDC gave a pleasing forecast for 2008 and thanks in no small part to the games that are on the horizon, it looks like it’s shaping up to be a very good year.

The crowd went silent as Cliff Bleszinski, leader designer for Epic Games Inc., walked onto the stage to finish Microsoft’s keynote address, bringing it to a dramatic close. He announced that Marcus Fenix and Delta Squad are continuing the fight on the Xbox 360 exclusive title Gears of War 2 and that it will be here in November. Applause and cheers echoed throughout the room not soon after.

Many new features for games were also discussed throughout the GDC and gamers had the opportunity to see more facets of games they’re dying to play.

When Molyenux took the stage everyone knew he was going talk about Fable 2 and that he did. Molyenux talked about his ‘big three’ ideas for Fable 2 – drama, co-op, and combat – he explained that it will be more difficult to be the good guy whereas in the original it was very easy to do. Combat will include swords, guns, and fists and you can even duke it out with a friend in co-op mode. Character interaction is also receiving a complete tune-up and it won’t be as dry or stale like it was in the original. Notably, Fable 2 will ship with an Xbox Live Arcade game spin-on where a player can gamble to win money and then use it while playing the Fable 2 itself. No word on a release date.

Over 200 games were showcased and discussed during this year’s GDC making it impossible to include them all here.

As is customary during each year, the GDC ends with the Annual Game Developers Choice Awards. Two games cleaned house this year and they were Portal and Bioshock. Portal took home Game of the Year for 2007, Best Game Design and the Innovation Award. Bioshock won three awards as well and they were Best Visual Art, Best Writing, and Best Audio. Other games to win were Real Time Worlds’ Crackdown for Best Debut, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for Best Handheld Game, and Best Downloadable Game went to flOw.

And that about wraps it up. Hope to see you at next year’s GDC back at the Moscone Center in San Francisco but on March 23 – 29 instead.