Lansdell's Lair 01.28.10: Action Games, Movie Games and Games Movies!

Posted by Chris Lansdell on 01.28.2010

411's Chris Lansdell takes a look at the problem with action games, why video games based on movies are not good, and why movies based on games are not much better!

Welcome to the third edition of Lansdell's Lair! I am Chris Lansdell, which you already knew. After two straight weeks of very serious material, I think we should go with something a little more light-hearted. After all, I spent a year writing serious stuff in the wrestling zone and it's time for a change ($1 to Owen Hart). I've got a few things to talk about today, and of course there's some feedback to address, so let's dig in shall we?

BANNER!



Cave Drawings

'played Bad Company with a gay'
I presume that's a typo rather than you being a hypocritical tapeworm.

Posted By: JBL (Guest) on January 20, 2010 at 11:21 PM

HA! Oh wow. That's great. Yes, a typo. I could have gone back and fixed it after you pointed it out, but where's the fun in that?

"Mark Salmela, ladies and gentlemen. He'll be here all week, because I can't find the heart fo fire him. He's special, you see, and I don't want the ACLU coming down on me."

Loopholes for the win!

If Target Terror had online connectivity the community would be described in two words: Fucking Awesome!

Posted By: The Salms (Registered) on January 21, 2010 at 12:25 AM

I think if you put another set of crosshairs on the screen everything would become a mass of nondescript pixels. Well, a BIGGER mass of nondescript pixels that is.


and that's why I don't wear a headset online anymore!

Posted By: Guest#5796 (Guest) on January 21, 2010 at 10:11 AM

Now how does that help? Don't know if it's just my system, but if I take off the headset I just hear the nonsense through my surround sound system and, worse yet, so does my wife.


I might be wrong but I think you can mute someone mid-game on call of duty

hit back to bring up the scoreboard use the right stick to scroll down then press 'A'

I'm 90% certain that's possible because I have exactly the same problem with my British accent as well.

Posted By: jaxorz90 (Guest) on January 21, 2010 at 11:28 AM

Several others mentioned this, thank you all. Now I just have to be fast enough to do that without getting killed...


best little kid quote " i am going to shit in your mouth"

Posted By: DH (Guest) on January 21, 2010 at 11:34 AM

While that is rather disturbing for a non-scatologist, it wouldn't bother me at all. That sort of trash talk is what I expect to hear.


I miss split screen gaming. Online is no substitute

Posted By: dAVE. (Guest) on January 21, 2010 at 01:12 PM

It's making a comeback. I know Modern Warfare 2 has it, for example. It's never going to be as popular because it limits your play partners to people in the same physical location, but it's still available. I miss the days of 2 TVs back-to-back and 2 PSX systems linked, playing Red Alert against my brother. Those were the days. My silo chain Tesla strategy against his turbo nuke strategy.



This "problem" has always been wildly over-exaggerated. When I started playing Halo 3 online, I was warned by all for the hordes of drooling maniacs spewing all kinds of stuff, but surprise surprise, the vast majority of players either stuck to game talk or said nothing at all. Just like any other game I've ever played online.

And the fact is, it IS the internet, so it's NOT real. Of course most wouldn't say these things in person, that's the whole point. It's not real, it's an outlet. The best players can brush off the worst trash talk, because that's all it is. Regardless of whether some terms offend your delicate sensibilities or not. Frankly, for a lot of people, if they knew someone would get affected by hearing racial slurs, they will spew that stuff out. Just because it's not polite is irrelevant, it is competitive gaming after all. You play on ranked games or servers, you are there to win. You need to be ready to face people who will do ANYTHING to do so.

For the record, I think CoD sucks ass, and all those people who are obsessed with it are fucking retarded. CoD 2 was the peak of the franchise, every game since is the same game with different camo.

Posted By: Frank (Guest) on January 21, 2010 at 02:00 PM

Wow, somebody didn't get their Hi-C Té Con Limón this morning! You are so far off base it's not even funny. If you've never heard people getting out of hand on Live, then you don't play on Live. Simple. Yes there are some decent people out there, and no you can't expect polite conversation either. What I do expect is that certain lines not be crossed, and I don't get that. If Microsoft did not agree, they would not allow you to complain about the things I find objectionable.

As for people being there to win...not really. I don't "win" anything. I'm there to have fun. You say the best players can rise above it...apart from never once claiming to be one of the best players, I can rise above people calling me almost anything, but when people say things that would get them arrested offline I lose my focus. I don't think a headset and the internet should mean you lose all decency.

Enough of that, on to this week!

Expand those horizons!

One thing I wanted to do this year was try some different types of games. Since the days of Tomb Raider and Resident Evil's first incarnations, I've been gun-shy on action games. I don't generally enjoy puzzles, the controls (especially on the Resi games) annoy me and the replay value tends to be pretty low. The last part at least is not really the developer's fault, it's hard to make someone come back to a mostly-linear game once they've played it through and already know the story. Still, my gaming over the past few years has been almost entirely sports games, music games, WWE games and the odd RPG, like Spectral Force 3. Battlefield: Bad Company pulled me into FPS games and although I still avoid alien shooters, I'll play more realistic ones. I tried Gears of War 2 and hated it. The lone exception in terms of action games was Star Wars: Force Unleashed, and that doesn't count because it's a Star Wars game.

Doing so much writing for the wrestling zone cut into my gaming time, and I realised I couldn't dedicate the time to playing through a full franchise mode in NBA Live any more. With my writers raving over games like God of War, inFamous, Arkham Asylum, Prototype and so on, I figured it was about time I took the plunge and tried to decide for myself if I could get into these games. Generally speaking you can pick up something like Prototype, play it for 10 minutes and then save it, which you can't really do in a sports game or an RPG.



Prototype caught my eye. The idea of changing into other people appealed to me and I was curious to see how it would work. You can get my full impressions on the game HERE (Game Improvements link), but essentially I felt it was too repetitive and the protagonist suffered too much from God syndrome, making it too easy. It was fun to play for a while, but eventually I grew tired of it. There wasn't enough variety in the enemies, I rarely felt challenged once I unlocked some of the wider-ranging screen-clearing attacks and I felt like I could just climb some skyscraper and recharge anyway, so combat held no thrill for me.

My interest was piqued however, and when I read about WET I was tempted. I mean it had Eliza Dushku in it, how bad could it be? The game was getting average reviews though, which was enough to make me hesitate before plonking down $60 on it. A combination of a recommendation from TNA wrestler Matt Morgan and a $20 price drop at EB Games was enough to make me take the plunge. Again, you can get my opinion of the game HERE (GI link), but the gist of it is, once again, that the game is fun but repetitive. Diving around shooting at people is fun for a while, and unlocking some of the nicer sword attacks helped a little bit, but when the best advice for playing this game consists of "jump before you do anything", the gimmick has become flawed and combat, the bread and butter of an action game like this, becomes repetitive. Now my opinion of action games is starting to become somewhat jaded.



But wait! Surely a game with an equally hot chick (although more librarian-hot than killer-hot) with more powers going on an angel-killing rampage through an ancient European city will fix that? In contrast to WET, I wanted Bayonetta from the first screenshot. The gameplay movie certainly didn't hurt things either. Watching this woman kill a screen full of angels with guns and her hair had me sold immediately. In fact it was almost like a supernatural version of WET with a few added bells and whistles, from what I could tell. I picked it up as soon as I could and…well, I won't call it a letdown but it's certainly suffering a bit from both God syndrome and from being repetitive, though to a much lesser degree. There's a wider variety of enemies and the difficulty curve is steep enough that you don't get to the point of complacency (which is a HUGE problem in WET, for example), but you also don't get to the point where you wonder how the hell you're going to survive. There are a lot of combination attacks in the game, but there are also a lot of enemies and it doesn't take long to rack those combos up. I am far from giving up on it and so far it hasn't got to the point where I feel like I'm playing on autopilot (things like Witch Time, collecting ingredients for alchemy and torture attacks have prevented that so far), but I can already tell that this is not a game I will come back to for long after I've finished it.

So where does this leave me, with two other action games on the market that look really good and are on my wish list? Darksiders has been out for a while and a lot of folk are calling it better than Bayonetta. The story in particular is getting strong reviews from what I've seen. Plus, playing as War seems to be a winning proposition from the start. I haven't really looked for any gameplay videos but I have seen trailers, and it certainly looks like I game I want. Dante's Inferno is based on classic source material of which any literature buff would be aware. The gameplay videos I've seen make it look a lot like God of War (which I have yet to try despite owning a PS2) with some neat thematic elements thrown in. Here's my issue though: nothing I've seen of or read about either game has done anything to convince me that they are not going to fall prey to the same problems that WET, Prototype and to a lesser extent Bayonetta all have. I'll probably pick them both up, but it looks I might wait for them to get traded in and save some cash to avoid being disappointed again.

Am I being unreasonable, adventure buffs? Is this all we can expect from action games? In order to make us comfortable with the control system and the protagonist, do we have to expect a certain amount of repetition? Are players more interested in a super-powered character than one who is at a disadvantage and has to use his brain more than his brawn to get by? Of the 3 games, Bayonetta is the only one that seems to have tried hard to address the issues with combat, and it does an admirable job, but ultimately I feel it will fall short. So I ask you readers: what game should I try to break my feeling of indifference to this genre? Am I expecting too much? I feel like my dislike for Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Deathtrap Dungeon and really any action-adventure game not named Metal Gear Solid is stopping me from fully enjoying these games, but is that actually the case? Help me oh readers!

Hollywood, We Wouldn't

Remember when entertainment genres kept to themselves? Movies were movies, games were games, albums were albums, TV shows stayed on TV and wrestling was wrestling. Sure a lot of books got made into films, and a few soundtracks were released on vinyl but that was it. Certainly it was rare to see a song from a movie be a major hit. To my knowledge E.T was the first movie to be made into a game, and really from there the lines blurred. Merchandising exploded, to the point where now a movie also has an official soundtrack (often with a chart-worthy song on it), an adaptation of the screenplay released as a novel, an appearance by the movie's star on a wrestling show, and in all likelihood an official video game. Also in all likelihood, said official video game will suck worse than a five dollar herpetic whore with an overbite.

Why do games based on movies suck? Crap movies like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, decent movies like G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, even very good movies like Avatar have all had awful games attached to them. Sure the odd exception exists (The Incredibles had a good game, as did Madagascar and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy), but for the most part you can equate "the official game of the film" with "wait a month and get it for $10…if you must." I think a big reason for this is production time: a movie can start filming tomorrow, wrap before the end of summer and be out before Thanksgiving. Games generally take longer, or at least they do if they are going to be any good. A movie only has to last 90 minutes and does not have to be beta tested for bugs and interface issues and countless other things. Any game that could be completed in 90 minutes would sell about as well as a Heidi Montag album. There's also the content factor: a movie game has to follow the movie closely, meaning that the developers are limited from day 1. Some of the best games that we've seen in recent years have been established franchises that expanded and twisted existing stories and mechanics. In the case of movies with epic scenes (like the Battle of the Pelennor Fields in Return of the King) the game can benefit, but movies are not written with video games in mind and the majority of scenes in movies just don't translate well to a console game.

Of course things go both ways in this exchange. Movies based on video games have also sucked royally. The first Mortal Kombat was good, but the less said about the sequel, the better. Street Fighter had an anime movie that was also pretty good, but the 2 (to my knowledge) live-action efforts have been vomit-inducing. The first Resident Evil was well-received, but the sequels have steadily declined in quality. Tomb Raider was bad, the sequel was worse, BloodRayne is the punchline to a joke that nobody wants to tell...the list goes on and on. Even the mighty Super Mario Bros franchise produced this:



Man, when a trailer can't even make the movie look good, you know you've got trouble.

I didn't even know that Tekken and Dead or Alive HAD movies. The reverse probably applies here: a video game doesn't need a deep storyline like a movie does, and the story in games can afford to play out over 8 or 9 hours of gameplay instead of the 90-120 minutes that a movie typically has.

Before leaving this section, I want to concentrate on the one abomination, the one waste of time and discs that surpasses all suck that has ever sucked. The game that couldn't even be saved by the possibility of playing as Jean Claude van Damme and being able to beat up Kylie Minogue. I'm talking about the only game based on a movie based on a game: Street Fighter The Movie: The Game.



It might SOUND like Street Fighter II, but nothing has ever looked worse. Ever. My GOD is that game awful. I'd rather play Target: Terror.

Over to you, readers!

You know what? We don't write this stuff for the fun of it. We write it for you. This is your zone as much as it is mine. With that in mind, what columns, features and specials would you like to see here? What do you enjoy and what are you not bothered about? Let me know, and we'll see what we can do. And no Salmela, Target: Terror will NOT be getting its own column.

That's all we have time for ladies and gentlemen. I'll be back next week, when this column will transform into that beloved staple of 411mania, the 4 Rs. Don't forget...

Lansdell on Twitter, for great justice!
http://www.twitter.com/411mania
http://www.twitter.com/411wrestling
http://www.twitter.com/411moviestv
http://www.twitter.com/411music
http://www.twitter.com/411games
http://www.twitter.com/411mma

Now put the snacks in the bag, and I'm ghost like Swayze!

Lansdellicious – Out.