StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Lets start with the blisteringly obvious (after all this is a 3rd person action game). The driving sections fucking suck. The car handles like it's tyres are made of some substance that grips the road more firmly than a vice grips whatever you fucking put in it. That is to say, that the amount of traction which your tyres are able to keep allows you to ignore such impediments as corners, as even approaching a hairpin with your foot pushing the gas pedal onto the cobblestones beneath the car, it will sweep around the bend without so much as it's back-wheels sliding an inch. I'm serious, the amount of tail-shaking in the driving sections is less than what you'd expect at a fucking quadriplegic clergy convention. The police are zero threat, the driving area is what can best be described as "tiny" and you know it's a terrible fucking thing when the best you can say is: "well, at least it's better than the driving in Enter The Matrix".

Next up. The gunplay. This comes before hand to hand, because it quite clearly takes precedence. That is to say, that once you pick up a gun or draw your pistol, I was unable to find a way to put it away. Meaning that though you are a fucking awesome arm-snapping machine, once you have a gun you are forced to use it. And the shooting mechanics are crap. You can only aim once you pull the LT, and in that mode it just feels odd. Like Bourne's arms are trapped in some invisible treacle and as you struggle to bring your weapon to bear after popping out from cover you are filled with innumerable rounds from the enemies shotguns and assault rifles.

Not to worry though, because like the police in the driving sections, every single encounter that you have in the demo can best be described as "zero threat". If you have your gun drawn you are best off just sprinting at the person and entering a cutscene.

Notice how I said cutscene rather than combat? That's because any time you get close enough to enter some hand-to-hand, you get a cutscene of Bourne unleashing some really quite nice looking hurt on the poor fool. Then it's your turn to take over. You get a choice of two buttons (light and heavy attack) and hammer these in any order you feel like to produce completely underwhelming, zero effect "combos". I only use the word combo here because there are several punches which queue up in a different order depending on what you press. Eventually you build up enough adrenaline to press the "I win" button. Where in you press it, it uses some of your adrenaline bar and you get to watch another short cutscene of Bourne messing the dude up. These are actually quite well animated and enjoyable to watch, but damnit - that's how the actual fight should have been.

Instead what we get are two guys squaring off with fucking Queensbury Rules. If your opponent starts to block, well, you're fucked, because there's no block-beating attack, you just have to wait for him to stop blocking. Similarly, if he feels like doing an attack it will interrupt you no matter what, even if you are within a micron of landing a massive Cro-Cop-esque headkick. Oh, and don't bother with kicks. They are a waste of time, you hold attack for about 2 seconds and eventually Bourne launches a lazy side kick that takes an age to land.

So, to sum up combat - you flail at each other like kids on a schoolground until you are able to hit the "win" button. People criticised Assassin's Creed for having simplified combat, but it was James Joyce compared to the "Dick and Jane" of The Bourne Conspiracy.

It's even so ridiculous as to artificially limit your actions. In the embassy level you are specifically told "you CANNOT fight the armed marines", yet in every other scenario, you are quite able to close upon and disarm, then fuck up and kill any other armed mook. But no, you come to close to the armed marines and suddenly it's a cutscene of Bourne having the handcuffs slapped on.

And now I'll move on to the single most challenging aspect of this game. Quicktime events. I hate them. I hate them SO FUCKING MUCH. It's nothing but lazy fucking game design. Sure, it was revolutionary back in 1983 [Dragon's Lair], but now it's a crutch for developers who want their game to look awesome but without actually having to spend time and money on anything like, you know, controls.

There are quicktime events for EVERYTHING in this game. Want to shoot someone at range? It's a quicktime event. Press the "I win" button with more than one person present? It's a quicktime event. Middle of a cutscene? Quicktime event.

And these are FAST. It's a random button each time so you can't anticipate it and my reaction times aren't poor, but I failed each event on average about 4-5 times before finally passing it. That's how ridiculous it is.

Hell, one of the levels features a bossfight where after you hit the "I win" button a certain number of times, depleting the bosses health, it suddenly goes to a fucking quicktime event where if you fail YOU LOSE. At least the developers have accepted that there game is so shit and these events so random and difficult to anticipate and complete that there's a fucking checkpoint between the end of the bossfight and the quicktime event.

Well, maybe I'll rent it, MAYBE. But there's no fucking way I'll buy this lazy turd. Because that's what it is. For a game that is meant to make you feel awesome (you're goddamn Jason Bourne kicking arse and taking names), instead you are made to feel incompetent and impotent, where your sole contribution to the game is hammering buttons like you're back playing the old C64 "... Games" series until you can press the "I win" button and have the game show you just how awesome it's meant to look. And then punish you mercilessly, time and time again for not having the reflexes to pass their shitty little delaying tactics reflex tests.

Is it worth the download? Sure, if you have the bandwidth to spare. If nothing else it will spare you the mistake of actually paying money for it at some point.

For a game that spent all of 10 months in development, I'm hardly surprised?

Damon put distance between himself and the game because he felt the game was going to base itself on 100% violence and ass kicking which he didn't feel Jason Bourne was all about. Maybe that, and the fact that it looked like derivative shit ever since it was announced?

CaptHawkeye wrote:For a game that spent all of 10 months in development, I'm hardly surprised?

Damon put distance between himself and the game because he felt the game was going to base itself on 100% violence and ass kicking which he didn't feel Jason Bourne was all about. Maybe that, and the fact that it looked like derivative shit ever since it was announced?

No, let's be more honest, Matt Damon wanted a Myst-like game, which would have sucked just as much as whatever will be coming out.

In the Iron Man game thread, i recall Darth Wong asking "why do movie games suck".

I was tired so i didnt say anything, but i felt like saying (and this applies to Bourne too) that it's the same reason that video game movies suck. Uwe Boll has nothing to do with it.

The fact is you cant turn a book or movie or show that is, by definition, NOT interactive into an interactive medium in any appreciable way and by that some logic turning an interactive experience (i.e. a game) into a two hour movie which is implicitly NOT about being interactive will fail just as hard.

Thats kind of complicated and rambling so i'll narrow it down...

Video Game Movies suck because you cant make a video game into a movie, it's not functional that way because you must strip away the elements that make it a video game in the first place (direct control by the viewer, interactivity) to make it a movie.

Movie-based Video Games suck because you cannot turn a medium such as TV or movies or books, which by definition cannot be directly controlled or interacted with, into a medium wherein interactivity and direct control are paramount.

Or put even more simply...you cant make a good movie video game, or video game movie, for the same reason you cant make wooden iron or dry water...because it's a contradiction of terms.

That's overly simplistic, and it ignores the rare few movie games that are actually good. Look, bottom line, not all games even GIVE the gamers a chance to interact in the story. The interaction begins and ends with action sequences, and you pass or fail based on that. Making a movie out of DOOM should have been the easiest fucking thing in the world.

Spiderman 2 had a fucking fantastic game. Escape from Butcher Bay was decent. Scarface seemed decent, and some other licensed games are pretty good. Dark Forces, X-Wing/TIE Fighter, KOTOR, all kicked ass. Even the game for Episode 3 was actually pretty good by several counts. There's actually a decent list of good (if not SUPAR AWESOME) movie games.

Here's the honest truth, and it has nothing to do with some sort of impassable barrier between the mediums of movies and video games. Video games from movies generally suck because you get second or third-string programmers with a stupid short development cycle to come out around the time as the movie. You then have to pay the fee to license the movie, which is money not spent into making the game.

Why movies from video games suck. Hollywood thinks its better than anything else. Directors and Actors can rewrite the fucking scripts at any time. They ignore the source material and write the movie they want to make, however shitty it is, and shoehorn it into the source material. Tomb Raider worked well, it stayed true to the source. Delving into ruins, shooting things, and a hot chick in tight clothing, with a plot strung together to allow for all those things. Look at Mario Brothers. Look at DOOM. Look at Street Fighter. Each and every one of those movies took only the most superficial aspects of the game they were doing and then did some crazy ass bullshit instead. It's the same reason most book movies suck, and the same reason most comic book movies suck.

There are some other ancillary reasons, but it is my position that you could make a good movie based on a game like Deus Ex, or Homeworld, or Independence War, or Freespace, but your average writer, director, and actor set from Hollywood can't manage that, because they look at it and go, "Oh, that's a horrible idea, let me change it to this wonderful idea I've been wanting to do for YEARS."

And away we go.

And Uwe Boll sucks intentionally, so we'll leave him out of this.

Hotfoot wrote:That's overly simplistic, and it ignores the rare few movie games that are actually good. Look, bottom line, not all games even GIVE the gamers a chance to interact in the story. The interaction begins and ends with action sequences, and you pass or fail based on that. Making a movie out of DOOM should have been the easiest fucking thing in the world.

Spiderman 2 had a fucking fantastic game. Escape from Butcher Bay was decent. Scarface seemed decent, and some other licensed games are pretty good. Dark Forces, X-Wing/TIE Fighter, KOTOR, all kicked ass. Even the game for Episode 3 was actually pretty good by several counts. There's actually a decent list of good (if not SUPAR AWESOME) movie games.

I disagree, but i'll get to that in the next quote, let me adress this for a moment. No offense, Hotfoot, but those are TERRIBLE choices for movie-to-game conversion.

Spiderman, the first game (i never played the second or third so i cant comment), was only tenuously like the movies. Do you remember Spidey fighting Vulture or Shocker in Spiderman 1? Maybe i missed that scene. But seriously they stripped away almost the entire meat of the movie to make a game that was, at best, somewhat like the movie in terms of a few setpieces. The movie was about as much like the game as my life is like Peter Parker's, including alternate storylines, new fights against villains that werent in the game, and giant robots; more so they included things like a sidequest where you, as Harry, become Green Goblin (inthe first game) and fight a clone of your father.

Escape from Butcher Bay had, quite literally, no relation to the Chronicles of Riddick or Pitch Black save for the title character, Riddick. Where were the Necromongers? Where were the bat monsters? Where was all the other characters like the Cleric, the Elemental or that Kyra(?) girl? No where, that's where. Sorry dude, but that's not a movie game, it is--at best--a game based off the FRANCHISE of Riddick.

Scarface, if you're thinking of the same game i am (Scarface: the World Is Yours), actually CHANGED the movie's plot so the titular character survives his final battle at the end and then takes up after that in what i can best describe as a decent, at best, shooter.

And again, much like the Riddick example, the licenced Star Wars games are not movie transfers (most of the time) but instead completely original efforts. KOTOR had NOTHING WHAT SO EVER to do with the movies, it didnt even reference something that happened in the movie's backstory as far as i know. The ones based off the movies, IMO, are less than impressive.

There may be good straight movie-to-game transitions but those are not examples of them.

Here's the honest truth, and it has nothing to do with some sort of impassable barrier between the mediums of movies and video games. Video games from movies generally suck because you get second or third-string programmers with a stupid short development cycle to come out around the time as the movie. You then have to pay the fee to license the movie, which is money not spent into making the game.

Second or third string production houses are at best a symtom of the larger problem, which is difficulty in transfering one medium to another. See below...

Why movies from video games suck. Hollywood thinks its better than anything else. Directors and Actors can rewrite the fucking scripts at any time. They ignore the source material and write the movie they want to make, however shitty it is, and shoehorn it into the source material. Tomb Raider worked well, it stayed true to the source. Delving into ruins, shooting things, and a hot chick in tight clothing, with a plot strung together to allow for all those things. Look at Mario Brothers. Look at DOOM. Look at Street Fighter. Each and every one of those movies took only the most superficial aspects of the game they were doing and then did some crazy ass bullshit instead. It's the same reason most book movies suck, and the same reason most comic book movies suck.

There are some other ancillary reasons, but it is my position that you could make a good movie based on a game like Deus Ex, or Homeworld, or Independence War, or Freespace, but your average writer, director, and actor set from Hollywood can't manage that, because they look at it and go, "Oh, that's a horrible idea, let me change it to this wonderful idea I've been wanting to do for YEARS."

Now i can get down to brass tacks.

Heres the thing. How DO you stay true to the source material of a video game like Doom? You can't really. If you did, or even tried, the movie would have to be almost a silent film with a picture of a gun moving through nondescript corridors fighting monsters. Now personally i'd find that awesome, but most "Critics" have their heads up their asses and their noses in the air (creating a kind of odd, ouroboros kind of thing) and would pan it. The truth is that MOST video games have no traditional "plot".

What is the plot of Super Mario Bros.? There is none. You save the princess and kill Bowser. Any movie remotely true to this would involve little else. The same for Homeworld...there are NO characters in Homeworld, none. Just you, some vaguely described "fleet command" officer, and the chick in the Mothership's computer. You'd have to create out of whole cloth an entire cast, interpersonal relationships, etc...you may as well just make an original movie and save money on the licence. Deus Ex is better than that, but it's so open ended that you'd pretty much have to chose one path out of many, which would be difficult at best as none of them would sell well with the public ("Lets see...apocalypse, or apocalyse or, oh! More apocalypse!").

The vast majority of games have no fully developed plot, beyond a simple framework used to explain why, precisely, you're killing Alien Races X, Y and Z. They're invading Earth! They took our womens! They kicked our puppy to death! And so on and so forth. And that's if a game actually has a plot, as some games like the Mario franchise barely have what can be called continuity, let alone a plot. Tomb Raider was a rare exception in that the game had no only a plot but a simple plot that, in and of itself, could be altered sufficiently to make a movie script. That's rare, vanishingly rare.

Converting a TV show into a movie is piss easy. Just make a longer version of an episode, basically. In fact back in the day they used to have pilot movies which they would release on video as one big movie, and show on TV as such, and then break up into the first two or three or four episodes of the show itself. Piss easy.

Same with comic books really. Comic books are an almost completly visual medium and this can be transfered easily to another visual medium, like TV or movies, with relative ease. And books, while a different kind of media, are typically descriptive enough and dependant on internal visualization that they can too easy jump ship, as it were.

But converting a moving, purely visual medium with no interactive quality at all into one that is based largely if not entirely on player imput is unlikely to yield fuit. By that same token turning a purely player driven experience, especially an open ended one, into a movie is like trying to turn a song into a movie...yeah it can theoretically work but in practice it tends to lose both form and function along the way. I'm not saying it's ENTIRELY impossible, what i'm saying is that if it is, it's rare, going both ways.

And Uwe Boll sucks intentionally, so we'll leave him out of this.

And thats another thing, i know it's not "chic" to say this but Uwe Boll gets a bad rap for nothing. Are his movies bad, mostly, some are at worst B-movies no worse than a made-for-TV or straight to DVD affair. But people talk about him like everything he ever made was Manos, Hands of Fate. Bullshit i say...i fucking DARE you to go and rent the above mentioned film and watch it. Not the MST3K version the straight, unspoiled version. Go ahead, watch it, and tell me that Bloodrayne is worse, or even equally bad...you cant and if you ever seen it, you wont, cause it'd be a damn lie.

The reality is that Uwe Boll's only sin is that the man has SPECTACULARLY bad taste in source material. Bloodrayne? Postal? House of the Dead? These are honestly some of the worst games out there, most of them lacking any kind of plot and all of them filled with horribly bad gameplay, and the characters, if they EXIST, are terrible and less-than-one-dimensional...somekind of subspatial dimensional characterization. No one could make these games good movies. Jesus Christ, if he still lived today, could not make these games good movies. And don't bring out Alone in the Dark...that was shit too, i cant even think of more than five people i know who even played those games and none liked them much.

It's the same thing with Ed Wood. Everyone says "OMG he's so bad!" but really Wood's main problem was he had no budget. If you look at most sci-fi movies around the time, they were at best, no better, and at worst FAR FAR less competently directed and written than the infamous Plan 9 from Outer Space. And their special effects were only marginally better, something no one ever mentions.

Same with Uwe Boll. Everyone knew BEFORE he ever made a video game movie in his life that video game movies blew ass. Street Fighter, MK Annihilation, Double Dragon, Mario Bros., Final Fantasy: the Spirit Within, and more recently Doom which was not made by him. These movies didnt suck because he made them, they sucked because you cant translate a game into a movie to any appreciable degree without changing or outright rewriting the plot, IF a plot exists in the first place...Mario Bros. had no such luck!

Now i'm not going to say that Uwe Boll is some great, visionary director. He's a B-movie director at best. But if he had never made a single video game movie, the only thing he'd be known for, instead of being "the metric of shit" as one person described him to me, would be making decent-to-meh range TV movies or straight to DVD movies. He's not a GREAT director, or even a very good one, but the fault is not entirely on his shoulders.

*sigh* And i'll no doubt get flamed for that, but whatever, people need a scapegoat. Because, you know, it cant just be the genre of "video game movies" is shit...it has to be condensed into a single being. Bellerophon needs his Chimaera.

18-Till-I-Die wrote:I disagree, but i'll get to that in the next quote, let me adress this for a moment. No offense, Hotfoot, but those are TERRIBLE choices for movie-to-game conversion.

Spiderman, the first game (i never played the second or third so i cant comment),

This is your first mistake. I specifically mentioned Spiderman 2 for a REASON. Everything past this point is a flawed argument, because I never brought up Spiderman 1's game, or Spiderman 3's game, I brought up Spiderman 2's game, specifically. Don't change the subject midstream, it's poor debating tactics and had this been any other day I would have torn you a new one for it.

was only tenuously like the movies. Do you remember Spidey fighting Vulture or Shocker in Spiderman 1? <snip long rubbish about fluff>

In any game of a movie, you're going to have sequences that were not in the movie. That is not, repeat, NOT a bad thing. Movies can leave a lot out for time reasons. I don't remember seeing Tom Bombadil in the movies of Lord of the Rings, and yet there he is in Lord of the Rings Online. Wow, according to you, that must SUCK. Never mind that he is a character in the books, much like the Vulture and the Shocker.

Most movies don't have buckets of action. Games do. So additional action pieces thrown into a game that weren't present in the movie are hardly a bad thing. You've ALSO moved the goalposts from making a GOOD game to making a game that is 100% faithful to the movie, and that's disingenuous. In any conversion, you're just simply going to have to take some liberties, that's a given from when you convert a novel to a movie, to a TV series, to a video game, to a comic book, or what have you. The act of conversion itself is not what makes a game bad, it's if the GAME IS BAD.

Escape from Butcher Bay had, quite literally, no relation to the Chronicles of Riddick or Pitch Black save for the title character, Riddick. <snip more red herrings>

This comment is hilarious, because the same exact thing can be said of the Chronicles of Riddick. The only thing relating it to Pitch Black was, get this, RIDDICK! By that metric, the game fits perfectly. Besides, Butcher Bay was supposed to be a prologue to the events on CoR, as a tie-in to the movie, much like Enter the Matrix was supposed to be the events before and during the movie, but not the movie itself.

Again, you're moving the goalposts. This was a game released around the same time as the movie in the same franchise and it was supposed to tie-in. Arguably that places it higher in canon because it's not an adaptation, its a whole new chapter that's supposed to be taken in as a part of the whole.

Scarface, if you're thinking of the same game i am (Scarface: the World Is Yours), actually CHANGED the movie's plot so the titular character survives his final battle at the end and then takes up after that in what i can best describe as a decent, at best, shooter.

Again, so what? A game based on a movie has to follow it exactly? It has to be either AWESOME or SUCK? It can't be okay? Get out of this binary mindset already and stop coming up for excuses why it "doesn't count".

Fuck man, if you applied this reasoning to the Bourne Conspiracy, you'd not be able to shoehorn it in as a "Movie Game" because it deviates from the movies and instead acts as a blending of styles and story from the books and the movies, blah blah blah.

And again, much like the Riddick example, the licenced Star Wars games are not movie transfers (most of the time) but instead completely original efforts. KOTOR had NOTHING WHAT SO EVER to do with the movies, it didnt even reference something that happened in the movie's backstory as far as i know. The ones based off the movies, IMO, are less than impressive.

True, though the Revenge of the Sith game is highlighted as a prime example of a good movie game. Lego Star Wars is another good example.

However, the licensed games, including KOTOR, are all arguably canon of various degress, and were greenlighted by Lucasarts, so they count as licensed games. It's not as good as an example, but it's proof that a franchise can make good games based on movies.

There may be good straight movie-to-game transitions but those are not examples of them.

Oh baloney. I came up with perfectly good examples and you hemmed and hawed reasons why "those don't count". If you applied the same logic to any other movie film games, we'd quickly find that there are no games based on movies ever.

Short version, your definition of "Movie Game" is SO LIMITED you IGNORE VIRTUALLY ALL EXISTING GAMES. This is a nonfunctioning definition, and is thus useless for the purposes of this discussion. You also completely ignored the examples you didn't try to disprove, either because you were not aware of them or just don't feel like admitting that your sweeping generalization is dead wrong.

Second or third string production houses are at best a symtom of the larger problem, which is difficulty in transfering one medium to another. See below...

Um, fit data to hypothesis much? You are taking a well known fact (shit dev teams make a lot of movie games) and another well known fact (most of the games made by shit dev teams suck) and instead of coming to the conclusion supported by the known facts (most movie games suck because of shit dev teams), you INVENT a whole new hypothesis based on some magical barrier in storytelling between mediums, which is fucking garbage. You can make good comic book movies, you can make good movies from novels and short stories, you can make good movies from plays, and you can make good movies from games, and the transfer can go BOTH WAYS. We've SEEN it done. Is it easy? No, you need a skilled team, but it CAN work.

Now i can get down to brass tacks.

Heres the thing. How DO you stay true to the source material of a video game like Doom?

It's pretty fucking simple, and Doom 3 made it even easier. Marine goes to Mars research facility. Gate to Hell opens. Marine + handful of survivors try to survive. People around the Marine die until the Marine tries to shut the gates to hell. Work in heavy things about tampering with things man was not meant to know. Only major change is throwing in more people around the marine because you need some human interaction on the screen, whereas in the game you're able to keep a character by himself with only a voice on the radio or on a recording to keep human interaction going. I'd snip the rest of your inane response, but there are things here worth mocking.

You can't really. If you did, or even tried, the movie would have to be almost a silent film with a picture of a gun moving through nondescript corridors fighting monsters.

You clearly got poor grades in English class, didn't you? There was a narrative in Doom, and while it was used as a thin excuse to have a bunch of crazy action that was stretched as far as you could manage, it can easily be worked into a movie, as described above. The fact that you're missing the forest for the trees is a problem you personally need to deal with, and you need to stop projecting.

Now personally i'd find that awesome, but most "Critics" have their heads up their asses and their noses in the air (creating a kind of odd, ouroboros kind of thing) and would pan it. The truth is that MOST video games have no traditional "plot".

First off, I'd counter by saying that most games have a pretty decent plot, but you'd probably respond with something like, "lol so whats the plot for tetris smart guy", so I'll start off with a fuck you. Did that get your attention? Good. You might find sitting behind someone and watching them play a game to be fantastic cinema and that the rest of us are morons for not agreeing, but it just illustrates further that you have no idea what makes a good movie or a good game.

What is the plot of Super Mario Bros.? There is none. You save the princess and kill Bowser. Any movie remotely true to this would involve little else.

And here's Tetris. Way to go, picking on a game originally made in 80's, when the level of discourse was just barely above a wedge of cheese eating dots and running from ghosts. Nice.

The same for Homeworld...there are NO characters in Homeworld, none.

And yet there was a wealth of depth available for anyone who wanted to make a movie. Giving names to a handful of commanders aside from Karan Sjet (which was the name of the chick in the mothership's computers, and yes, it was referenced in the game) and roll with it. Again, your near deafening roar of idiocy is not my problem. We've seen good movies from games, and good games from movies, the transition can occur, we've seen it. You are just plugging your ears and screaming "LALALALALA" as loud as you can...why? I mean, what do you gain from being right about this?

Deus Ex is better than that, but it's so open ended that you'd pretty much have to chose one path out of many, which would be difficult at best as none of them would sell well with the public ("Lets see...apocalypse, or apocalyse or, oh! More apocalypse!").

Open-ended my ass. The story had some paths, but it was essentially linear. The only "open-ended" parts were the gameplay, and really, gameplay is not what makes a game a decent movie, it's the story, so let's get off this tired horse, shall we?

The vast majority of games have no fully developed plot, beyond a simple framework used to explain why, precisely, you're killing Alien Races X, Y and Z. They're invading Earth! They took our womens! They kicked our puppy to death! And so on and so forth. And that's if a game actually has a plot, as some games like the Mario franchise barely have what can be called continuity, let alone a plot. Tomb Raider was a rare exception in that the game had no only a plot but a simple plot that, in and of itself, could be altered sufficiently to make a movie script. That's rare, vanishingly rare.

If you're going to include EVERY GAME EVER, sure, not too many have plots. Especially the flash-games, or puzzle games, or what have you. However, most Adventure games, FPS games, RPG games, even RTS games, Space Sim games, and so on, do actually have plots that you can actually work with. And yes, some are better than others. Just like some movies are better than others. It's a shock, I know, but there are shitty movies too, and citing the poor examples does not prove your point in the slightest. You'll note I never said make a Tetris movie, so this ends up being yet another worthless red herring.

Converting a TV show into a movie is piss easy. Just make a longer version of an episode, basically. In fact back in the day they used to have pilot movies which they would release on video as one big movie, and show on TV as such, and then break up into the first two or three or four episodes of the show itself. Piss easy.

It's lazy. TV shows with a plot are able to take a very different pacing to a movie. Most examples of TV -> Movie conversions suffer exactly because they don't change the pacing and it turns into just a long episode.

Same with comic books really. Comic books are an almost completly visual medium and this can be transfered easily to another visual medium, like TV or movies, with relative ease.

That's an idiotic argument. You just told me that still pictures = easy conversion, because it's visual, but VIDEO GAMES, which have SOUND AND IMAGES AND MOTION, just like movies do, THAT is hard. Come off it, that's a retarded statement. A smarter statement would be, "Comic books are easy because they exist as a step in modern moviemaking. You simply use each frame as a part of the storyboard and alter the pacing slightly as demanded by the movie."

It's not even that you're wrong per se on that one, but you're using really shitty arguments.

And books, while a different kind of media, are typically descriptive enough and dependant on internal visualization that they can too easy jump ship, as it were.

Problem: Novels are longer than movies. It's easier to turn a short story into a movie, because there's not as much to convert. While yes, a page of visuals turns into a five second shot, and action can be condensed, conversations, which run FAST on the page, DRAG on screen. Look at any given novel -> movie translation. A huge amount has to be cut to fit the story into the 1.5-3 hour time slot. Just like in games, you have to find the core concept the novel is trying to tell and rework things accordingly. Games fit in the same area, you have to slice out a lot of things that just won't work in film. Just like internal dialog gets axed, tropes of gameplay are excised appropriately.

But converting a moving, purely visual medium with no interactive quality at all into one that is based largely if not entirely on player imput is unlikely to yield fuit.

Okay, this has gone on long enough. I've long ago challenged this concept and you ignored it. PROVE THAT MOST GAME STORIES ARE BASED ON PLAYER INTERACTION. This is the fundamental flaw in your entire concept. When you make a movie based on a book, you don't say, "Hey, the action of watching a movie is nothing like picking up a book and turning the pages. THIS SUCKS!"

The gameplay itself is not what you bring over, though it CAN influence the action sequences (and it should), it's the STORY. If you can't grasp that, you should walk away right now and just give up, because this will turn into a multi-page shouting match where I and others try to pound this basic concept into your brain.

And Uwe Boll sucks intentionally, so we'll leave him out of this.

The man used a cutscene from a game as actual special effects in his first movie. That's horrible and deserves mocking. He intentionally makes movies that failed to make money through a tax loophole. He is not a factor in this discussion, and I will not talk about him further. He is a money-grubbing fraud who has set back movies based on games by years.

I will, however, bring up the fact that you intentionally ignored Mortal Kombat. You brought up the sequel, which did suck, but not the original movie, which was:
-Good
-True to the source material

Doesn't that just demolish your entire argument that you can't make a good movie based on a video game? I mean, Mortal Kombat's story was minimal, a thin justification for people to beat the crap out of each other, and the game itself wasn't even that special. The gameplay was mediocre. The movie, however, was GOOD.

I mean, that pretty much demolishes virtually all of your longwinded arguments in one example. Why did you write all of that? Because you want to try being the Devil's Advocate?

Okay, I'm going to finish this up with a concept that is going to BLOW YOUR MIND.

90% of everything is shit. Everything. Do you go to every movie that comes out? Do you rent every direct to DVD movie? Do you watch every TV show? Read every book? No? Why not? Because 90% of everything sucks.

You can make excuses, but all the excuses don't change the fact that once some talentless hack gets ahold of something that was done well by someone else, it's going to suck. Get it? Now go crawl off into your hole without dessert and think about what you did. This is the one big post you get. From here on in, I'm just going to beat you over the head with the facts and go from there.

Oh not that "Sturgeons Law" crap. Is this 90% number even based off any evidence or facts? Of course not it's the same thing as that oft quoted nonsense about how half the population is retarded based off the average IQ being 100, i.e. it's crap designed to make snobs feel better when everyone ignores them.

Anyway...

Why didnt i mention Mortal Kombat? Well ok lets mention it. Mortal Kombat DOES have a plot, unlike most games, in fact the character interactions are extremely complex and factor heavily into the endings of many characters. More so the plot is not entirely there to justify the game itself, or at least not since MKII where it became an increasingly developed storyline (indeed some people say too developed, claiming they need a "chart" to keep track) and some games were built completely around the story itself. Which is not to say that the fighting has vanished, only that they managed to actually turn a game about ninjas using magic harpoons to kill people into what amounts to a soap opera. This is important to note as MK I was, most interestingly, one of the examples of a good movie game...notice how i also gave Tomb Raider as an example and stressed that IS possible but difficult and requires some guile to do, but then you prefer to strawman my position based on half a quote so whatever.

I love how you say "Oh but Mario was made in the 80s!" so what? What is your point. If you were right then it would be easy to adapt even that...unless games are more about personal interaction with the game world (i.e., play it) than watching stuff happen. If that were the case then...only a few games would be realistically capable of being made into movies...which is exactly what i said, but which you snipped out because you like to strawman my position as it grates on your nerves. Notice i never included Tetris? I never even mentioned ANY game that was not an action game, and yet you picked out that one and claimed, that is bullshitted, that i was claiming ALL GAMES EVER should have deep plots. Bullshit, in fact i dont consider plot that important in a game, which was my point even though you missed it while you were distorting my argument...Mario had no plot, AT ALL, but it made an excellent game. Doom, for all your claims, has no plot besides a thin whisp of a story...and these games rock. Play Mario Bros. 3, tell me it doesnt kick ass. You know why? Because it's a GAME and it's quality is based on personal fun and gameplay, NOT story.

Anywho...

It's pretty fucking simple, and Doom 3 made it even easier. Marine goes to Mars research facility. Gate to Hell opens. Marine + handful of survivors try to survive. People around the Marine die until the Marine tries to shut the gates to hell. Work in heavy things about tampering with things man was not meant to know. Only major change is throwing in more people around the marine because you need some human interaction on the screen, whereas in the game you're able to keep a character by himself with only a voice on the radio or on a recording to keep human interaction going. I'd snip the rest of your inane response, but there are things here worth mocking.

Ok so who are these people? Oh yes people that you make up for the game, and thus create interactions and story progression wholly seperate from what the game itself had. By doing so you in effect change the story since the ACTUAL story is about one man, alone, on Hell dominated Mars...never mind that what you just described as the actual Doom movie, which, oh yeah, sucked. Anyway...Know why it's easier to keep human interaction going with just a radio smart guy? Cause GAME is about YOU playing it, not watching it be played, and thus you are by definition already interacting with it.

You clearly got poor grades in English class, didn't you? There was a narrative in Doom, and while it was used as a thin excuse to have a bunch of crazy action that was stretched as far as you could manage, it can easily be worked into a movie, as described above. The fact that you're missing the forest for the trees is a problem you personally need to deal with, and you need to stop projecting.

Doom has what can best be described as a "story", in as much as it says "You're on Mars, which is now in Hell, go fight John Romero's head...i mean, the Icon of Sin!" You failed to notice that part about Tomb Raider WORKING as a movie which i added.

Anway, to adress your examples of good movie games.

The Chronicles of Riddick series is, indeed, a franchise based around Riddick the main character, obviously as his name is on it. But the game itself was marketed as an ORIGINAL story, i.e. it has no relation to the movie The Chronicles of Riddick save as a "prequel" of some sort, and the main character. Ok so i'll grant you that, as a part of the franchise, it works, but it's then not a movie game but a game within an established franchise as it's NOT BASED ON A MOVIE...it's an original plot, the connection to the movie is tenuous. And in fact the connection between Pitch Black and Chronicles is stronger as it has, basically, all the surviving characters from Pitch Black still in it at the beginning and progesses the plot forward. In otherwords it's a direct sequel. However i realize now that that argument is, perhaps, tenuous considering the prequel-ish nature of Butcher Bay so i'll concede that argument.

The Star Wars games, with the exception of a few games based off the movies, are not actually "movie games" in that they arent...based off a movie. Jedi Starfighter, Republic Commando, the Clone Wars game, the Podracing game, KOTOR. All but a few ARE NOT based on any Star Wars movie and are in fact original stories, and some that aren't are based off comic books, all of which at best proves that licenced games don't suck.

You're right i didnt mention Spiderman 2, but ok fine. So at what point in the movie Spiderman 2 did Mysterio, Rhino and Shocker show up in that movie? How about Black Cat, did they ever get Jessica Alba to play her i heard somewhere she was in the running? How about that whole part with the trials of Mysterio and him trying to kill you and with the mass illusions and all that jazz, or, hey, how about that pitched battle with Calypso at the end of the movie huh? You're right i made a huge mistake not using Spiderman 2 as an example, it goes even FURTHER away from the plot of the movie. Notice a pattern in Spiderman games though. Or maybe we saw different movies, i recall the whole Doc Ock fusion sun gambit but some of the rest is a tad foggy, admitedly i was a little stoned maybe i zonked out and missed it.

Scarface was a HUGE change from the movie...more than Spiderman even, because one could (bullshitting) say that thats tuff maybe happened when we werent looking. The ending of Scarface is pretty conclusive...i know, i have it on DVD, all Black guys do it's like a law or something. I wish i could put up images to show you what i mean but all i can say is that if the main character DIES at the end of the story i expect any adaptation short of total remake in the vein of Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes to be true to that story at least in that sense. That's be like making a crappy King Kong game and then changing the ending because it feels better...oh wait...

And Lego Star Wars? Really? I didn't even think anyone played that, but then i long ago swore off helping George Lucas suckle the dried up tit of his cash cow unless or until he releases a movie he makes personally. I've never played Lego Star Wars but as i understand it, it's a mishmash of various movies told via lego bricks, yes? Well...i've heard it's a fun little ditty, if rather sureal, and it DOES stay true to the plot as far as Wikipedia tells me so...ok you got me i'll concede that point and give you that one too. Again i've never played the ROTS game however so i cant comment, i only try to comment on games i've actually finished as i dont think it's fair to do otherwise unless it's impossible to complete the game for some rason. THAT is why i typically dont critique on games i havn't at least played a demo of.

Ok so, upon rethinking the situation, you're right Butcher Bay and some Star Wars games dont suck. Which in effect proves that licened franchises can produce orginal games, or games based off entries in that franchise, which are good. If i have not been clear i never said that it was impossible, but extremely difficult, to produce good video game movies. Some games have plots and sequences that SCREAM movie to begin with, like Tomb Raider, and so fuction perfectly with only minor changes (actually with Tomb Raider they made almost no changes at all, interestingly enough).

And here's Tetris. Way to go, picking on a game originally made in 80's, when the level of discourse was just barely above a wedge of cheese eating dots and running from ghosts. Nice.

So wait, i can only use games made in the 90s or 00s? Ok great then, how about Super Mario Sunshine? But seriously, you're talking about me moving goalposts but now you're narrowing your definition of "games with a plot" to "games with a plot made within the last half decade when they started caring about story arcs and shit".

That's an idiotic argument. You just told me that still pictures = easy conversion, because it's visual, but VIDEO GAMES, which have SOUND AND IMAGES AND MOTION, just like movies do, THAT is hard. Come off it, that's a retarded statement. A smarter statement would be, "Comic books are easy because they exist as a step in modern moviemaking. You simply use each frame as a part of the storyboard and alter the pacing slightly as demanded by the movie."

No actually it's because Comics are, in effect, TV shows told more slowly. To make a good comic book movie you need only stay true to the plot of the comic, pick a storyline (direct translation or reworking thereof) and run with it--any minor changes need not be story related but merely there to cutdown or pad out the "episode". In fact every good comic to movie conversion has used this concept, thus proving it's effectiveness. Examples: Spiderman I, most Superman movies, most Batman movies (including Forever), the recent Iron Man movie. In fact this is precisely why books work too...they're in effect movie scripts read slowly, and have many of the qualities thereof such as describing the envrionment, characters, personalities, relationships and the like and all you have to do is take that and either pad it a bit or cut off some excess fat an viola, a movie. Lord of the Rings is perhaps the most obvious, successful example but Narnia also comes to mind and, as much as i hate the series, the Inheritance Trilogy movie did well too largely for this reason.

PROVE THAT MOST GAME STORIES ARE BASED ON PLAYER INTERACTION.

You serious?

Ok.

Game, dictionary definition.

Video game, dictionary definition.

Video game, wiki article.

Game, ditto.

Notice a trend? All examples implicitly presume that the player--who PLAYS the game and thus interacts with it--will have to do so regularly to win. I really cant believe this, this is like asking me to prove we breathe air, it's like saying "prove the sun generates heat". What exactly do you think a game, or video game, is about then sunshine? Do you sit like a lemon watching the attract mode and the intro movies of games without playing them? Do you use cyberpathic abilities to control the game psionically?

The man used a cutscene from a game as actual special effects in his first movie. That's horrible and deserves mocking.

Which makes the movie only half as shitty as the game itself, by definiton of only having the cutscene instead of the whole game.

He intentionally makes movies that failed to make money through a tax loophole.

Actually it's a perfectly legal concept in Germany, but i agree it's fairly dishonest it's not fraud.

He is not a factor in this discussion, and I will not talk about him further. He is a money-grubbing fraud who has set back movies based on games by years.

Yeah cause the crushing bombs of Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter, Double Dragon, Doom, etc only ever ENHANCED the public's opinion of game movies. Nevermind they were a laughing stock for years before Bloodrayne was ever produced. Never mind that Square's movie stupid...i'm sorry, studio went under because their game movie was so bad.

I will, however, bring up the fact that you intentionally ignored Mortal Kombat. You brought up the sequel, which did suck, but not the original movie, which was:
-Good
-True to the source material

Doesn't that just demolish your entire argument that you can't make a good movie based on a video game?

It would if my argument was that it was impossible, not improbable. Which is isnt since i mentioned Tomb Raider as an example of a success and said several times it was possible but extremely hard without the proper skill or source material that already lent itself to games. I actually chose Annihilation because i think the Mortal Kombat series is rife with instances that would work perfectly, plotwise and such, for movies but Annihilation still screwed it up largely because they decided to change shit.

Why did you write all of that? Because you want to try being the Devil's Advocate?

No actually it's because it's true. Same with Ed Wood, he's considered "bad" because of word of mouth and legends, and God only knows his production values were through the floor, but by and large if you strip away the bad special effects his movies were rank and file 50s/60s sci-fi and sometimes more competent than their less infamous peers.

My god, you really are a moron, aren't you? I gave you a pass, and it's like you didn't even get it. You're dead set on sticking to the most retarded of minutiae as though these little specks somehow prove your point while you completely ignore the elephant about to crush your head.

Some good movies made from video games:

Mortal Kombat
Tomb Raider
Resident Evil
Silent Hill

There are some anime movies for King of Fighters and Street Fighter, also, but Japan tends to do better treatments than the US does.

Some good video games made from movies:

Spiderman 2
Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher's Bay
Lego Star Wars
James Bond 007: Goldeneye

The list actually goes on for this one, and goes on for a while. The difference, of course, is that more video games are made of movies than vice versa.

Now you hem and haw and fail to acknowledge the fact that gameplay and storyline are two very different things. You wasted ALL my time reading your post to see if you actually brought up a good point. Next time, please supply a Cliff's Note's version that says "I have no point, please ignore me".

When you make a game based on a movie, you try to make a game that makes people feel like they are a part of the world the movie helped to create, or you lead them through a story that ties in with the story told in the movie. There's lots of different kinds of games, by the by, so you could have an action game, an RTS, an RPG, an adventure game, and in fact, some movies have had all of those. Lord of the Rings in particular comes to mind. You've had Battle for Middle Earth (RTS), action games (The Movie release games, which actually were pretty decent action games), RPGs (LOTRO and whatever that Final Fantasy clone was), and adventure (IIRC, there was a "The Hobbit" adventure game that came out a little while back). They were all GOOD games (At least I presume they were, most got decent reviews), they all brought the players into the world of Middle Earth. They all told a story that was either similar to the story in the movies or played on the story around what the overarching plot was.

I think the key here is, of course, is that the game itself, regardless of what it is, has to be fun. The work is done on the story, by and large, so making that into a fun game is the primary job that needs to be done by the dev team. Is it difficult? Sure, but as you said, you don't need a huge story to have a fun game. A good movie game's primary job is to be a good game and not totally fuck up the feel of the movie. They don't, however, have to have EVERY aspect of the movie in them. Goldeneye is arguably one of the most wildly successful movie games of all time, and it owes most of its success to having good gameplay and multiplayer, not a slavish adherence to the movie (though it did a decent job of following the movie around, it didn't have any of the sex or interaction the movie had).

Of course, that doesn't mean that the game sucks because it didn't have a hot Russian chick wrapped around Bond, but I'm sure you'll harp on that.

Now then, making a game into a movie, a much more difficult affair, and let's face it, not a lot of people have tried. There aren't many game movies on record, but there are notable successes. Yes, in some cases, you need to work in a few changes so it plays better on screen, but the same is true of some books. When a character is by himself for too long, it gets boring on the Silver Screen unless you have:

1. Awesome writers
2. Awesome direction
3. An incredible actor to sell it on screen

So in games where the character is all alone, it's a hell of a lot harder to sell that sort of scene, and people enjoy watching human interaction, something I'm sure you don't get because you clearly don't get enough of it. So you make it more fluid by making some of those voices on the radio or on audio discs and make them into actual characters. It's not hard, especially when you take Doom 3 and turn it into a movie. I mean, there are plenty of established characters to pull from. Just like there are tons of established characters in Homeworld, you just need to flesh them out a little bit more.

Now, it's harder to make movies out of games with less story, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone with an iota of sense, but since you lack that tiniest speck of an ancient language, you need it spelled out.

Mario, along with most of the games made in the first few generations, were nearly 100% gameplay. The first Mario Brothers game, with the POW button, Pac Man, Lunar Lander, Asteroids, Galaga, the list goes on. Super Mario Brothers was nearly entirely gameplay with the most retarded story you could imagine. Turning it into a movie was about as retarded as casting a Hispanic man as an Italian.

By the way, this mad insistence that you have of comparing games LIKE Mario to, say, Wing Commander, which itself had live action cinematic cutscenes starring MARK FUCKING HAMIL brings to mind a sort of insanity that I cannot comprehend, much like the contents of a book describing the tenants of faith of Cthulu. As I open up and peer through the dusty pages of this tome, I delve deeper into the mad imaginings of horrors man was not meant to know...and yeah, I'm bored with this already. You're a fucking hypocritical moron who can't string together a coherent argument if your balls were about to be vaporized by a laser.

You've done nothing to prove that the story of a game is based on player interaction, just that video games themselves are based on player interaction. That says NOTHING for the story being told. The idea that you have to win for the game to continue is like saying that you have to turn the page for the story of a book to continue, or stay awake to watch a movie. It is MEANINGLESS. Interaction with a STORY means that player interaction CHANGES THE OUTCOME OF THE FUCKING STORY.

But hey, I guess that's too much of a concept for you to fathom.

PS- I said that Uwe Boll IS a fraud, not that he COMMITTED fraud. Another case of your inability to read. He is a fraud because he sells himself as someone who attempts to make good movies. He doesn't. Ergo, he is a fraud, and yes, I've seen his fucking movies, so fuck off.

I think movie games have always suffered from the same issues compared to 'regular' games.

1) licences cost money

2) often smaller developers

3) pre-set universe narrows scope artistically

4) committee development style results in 'low risk' game designs

They're not any worse once you remove the elements of inexperience, budget, lack of engagement of the artistic people involved (from mechanics to artists to story guys) and the doubtless constant meddling from contract obligations or licence-holders. Being saddled with all the extra baggage and recieving nothing in return beyond the name makes it unsurprising that the games are usually poo. It's not like they're ALL poo, after all.

All of which I've said earlier, but which was summarily ignored by 18 with his "I'M RIGHT AND THEY MUST ALL SUCK BECAUSE OF THIS INEXORABLE LAW OF NATURE" bullshit.

Shit, you totally did too. Um, carry on? What are simple obvious explanations before the 'lurl movie gamez always suck' concept?

It's cool, I feel the love mang. Clones for life.

Going back to the OT, before 18 decided to take his impotent rage from another thread out over here, I had reservations about the game the moment I saw gameplay footage. The combat looked intensely like quicktime events, and it seemed kind of, well, slow and not intense like the action scenes from the movies. What kills me is that they didn't have a major deadline for this, so they could have done a lot of stuff with the movie and books, and made an awesome cool game on top of it. Oh well, what a pity.

I love how you accuse me of being "longwinded" then write an argument almost the same length, or longer, than mine. If you cant bother to read other people's arguments then dont post a reply, my job isnt to post "TL;DR" whenever you feel fatigued.

Anyway, last things first, you seem to either not understand what i am saying (a distinct possibility, i'm sometimes unclear) or are outright strawmaning me. I never said that the story of a game was based on player interaction. I said that video games, BY DEFINITION, are dependant on player interaction for most of their entertaiment and taking that out can leave it flat or even outright bad. In fact i seperated the concepts of plot and gameplay, or at least i hope i have done so clearly--in my argument as you had in yours. I was under teh impression that we were discussing the ENTERTAIMENT value and plot and gameplay were seperate metrics used in consdiering that, am i right or wrong?

I honestly dont know where you got this idea i was trying to say that interaction was integral to a game's story seeing as i explicitly pointed out that some games had no story at all and were still great on a gameplay level (i.e., Super Mario Bros. 3) and i thought i made it clear when i did so. Look if we're both struggling under some misunderstanding of what the other means, let me know cause i thought your argument was this:

"Games based off movies, and vice versa, can be made easily given the proper direction and writing. This is sometimes difficult but not as hard you think."

And my argument was this:

"Games and movies are very different in execution, one depending on direct action by the player, the other requiring none, and so it's extraordinarily hard to properly translate one to the other."

Now if i got you wrong, then forget it, mea culpa.

And i contest that Resident Evil is that "good". The plot barely scratches the games at all, and basically was an excuse by the director to cast his fiance (Mila whatsherface) as some waif-fu empowered, gungslinging, proto-River Tam minus the psychotic episodes. Is Resident Evil a decent movie, oh sure, but it uses very little from the actual game and in fact changes the plot considerably. I've heard nothing but bad things about the Silent Hill movie, from Silent Hill fans no less, but having not seen it myself i reserve judgement. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and presume it's at least passable. I already acknowledged the original MK movie was good, if dated, and Tomb Raider hit the nail on the head.

My point was that there ARE games that make good movies, but they're few and far between and most are written in a movie-ish style to begin with, plot wise and in terms of gameplay. Interestingly they could have done Resident Evil closer to tthe game, but again, the creators of the game didnt go down on the director so they dont get a say.

Some good video games made from movies:

Spiderman 2

Yeah sure, after changing the plot a bunch it's a decent game. But the plot only kicks into the movie after you get past...Shocker, Rhino and Mysterio...and a plot largely divorced from the movie at many points.

Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

Never played it, as far as i can recall, so i cant say if this is true or not.

Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher's Bay

Actually, you yourself proved, in my mind anyway, this is more of a "prequel" than a game based on the movie. But like i said before it was a pretty good game so ok, no argument.

Lego Star Wars
James Bond 007: Goldeneye

No argument. Interestingly i prefered Goldeneye: Rogue Agent more, in rertrospect, but that doesn't count to the discussion or anything i just felt like sharing since that game gets a lot of grief for tenuous reasons at best.

When you make a game based on a movie, you try to make a game that makes people feel like they are a part of the world the movie helped to create, or you lead them through a story that ties in with the story told in the movie.

See this is what i mean i think we mainly disagree on terms. I always considered a "movie game" to be actually based on the movie proper, not a story that ties in. If we count that, like with Chronicles of Riddick, then the playing field increases dramatically and it's more prone to find both good and bad (typically bad) examples then a more narrow reading of the terminology. But like i said i think we started this off each assuming the other was using the same definition, be it broad or narrow, and that may have caused some misunderstanding.

There's lots of different kinds of games, by the by, so you could have an action game, an RTS, an RPG, an adventure game, and in fact, some movies have had all of those. Lord of the Rings in particular comes to mind. You've had Battle for Middle Earth (RTS), action games (The Movie release games, which actually were pretty decent action games), RPGs (LOTRO and whatever that Final Fantasy clone was), and adventure (IIRC, there was a "The Hobbit" adventure game that came out a little while back). They were all GOOD games (At least I presume they were, most got decent reviews), they all brought the players into the world of Middle Earth. They all told a story that was either similar to the story in the movies or played on the story around what the overarching plot was.

LOTR is a tricky example...i would say those are all, including the movie, based off the BOOK, as that was the original source material. True the games take elements from the movies more than the book thats because the movie is a more fluid, visual example...none of that would have existed without the original book. Making it kind of an odd...book-based movie game example. Again i think you're using too broad a definition, because by this logic i can include that Star Wars fighting game and the racing games as examples of "bad movie games" if we just include anything tied into the fictional universe itself, carte blanche.

I think the key here is, of course, is that the game itself, regardless of what it is, has to be fun. The work is done on the story, by and large, so making that into a fun game is the primary job that needs to be done by the dev team. Is it difficult? Sure, but as you said, you don't need a huge story to have a fun game. A good movie game's primary job is to be a good game and not totally fuck up the feel of the movie. They don't, however, have to have EVERY aspect of the movie in them. Goldeneye is arguably one of the most wildly successful movie games of all time, and it owes most of its success to having good gameplay and multiplayer, not a slavish adherence to the movie (though it did a decent job of following the movie around, it didn't have any of the sex or interaction the movie had).

Actually the James Bond games tend to be very close to the movie. And one doesnt expect them to include the sex, i mean really, that is barely included in the movie as it is (little barely soft-core stuff like you see on cable) and would be impossible to put in the game in any appreciable way that i can think of. That being said Goldeneye did a very good job of actually recreating the movie proper in the form of a game, which makes it a very good example (actually i was surprised you hadn't brought it up earlier, as i was thinking about it but i decided not to). Now many James Bond games suck ass...but that being said not all of them can be Goldeneye.

Way to be adult about the "human interaction" quip too. Yeah i'm just a sci-fi nerd on a SW fansite i suck...oh wait yeah so are you, way to fail toolbox.

Anyway i'd love to see these "characters" in Homeworld. Let me think, there is the cyborg chick in the Mothership (i know her name, BTW), the nebulous "Fleet Command" voice, the barely distinct voices of some units, the Bentusi, and that rebel commander guy at the end of the first game. Now by any realistic measure that is not enough characters to make a drama department version of Hamlet. You would have to create, at least, six or seven more minimum to fill out anything like a workable cast, not including extras, and you'd have to create backstories, or at least workable current stories, and personalities for each of them PLUS the main "characters" who are at best faceless voices and glaring non-entities at worst.

Mario, along with most of the games made in the first few generations, were nearly 100% gameplay. The first Mario Brothers game, with the POW button, Pac Man, Lunar Lander, Asteroids, Galaga, the list goes on. Super Mario Brothers was nearly entirely gameplay with the most retarded story you could imagine. Turning it into a movie was about as retarded as casting a Hispanic man as an Italian.

Agreed but that was my point as most games, TODAY, fall under this heading too. Before you go on and on about my "impotent rage" (LOL Oh my heavens i'm so wounded... what the hell does that mean? Rage about what? I never was even angry toolset, way to project dude) you should at least have noticed that. Oh but i forget, you cant be bothered to read anything too long. I forget you're like those hyperactive twelve year olds on Ritalin.

By the way, this mad insistence that you have of comparing games LIKE Mario to, say, Wing Commander, which itself had live action cinematic cutscenes starring MARK FUCKING HAMIL brings to mind a sort of insanity that I cannot comprehend, much like the contents of a book describing the tenants of faith of Cthulu. As I open up and peer through the dusty pages of this tome, I delve deeper into the mad imaginings of horrors man was not meant to know...and yeah, I'm bored with this already. You're a fucking hypocritical moron who can't string together a coherent argument if your balls were about to be vaporized by a laser.

Um...where did i compare the two? I never even mentioned WC or any games in that series, despite the fact that they were icompetently turned into a movie by, IIRC, their own creator and failed at it. In fact i'd wager that if they made the movies like the...movies in the game...then the movies would have been better.

I'm sorry if this is too long for you to read, if you like i can shorten it down to a crayon scrawl on a wall so you wont have to read or anything. Cause, like, reading is HARD!

What i find hee-larious is how just OUTDONE you are Hotfoot by how "long" by replies are.

Really?

Cause seriously i just wrote this stuff up after reading through your posts fairly easily. But then i'm not posturing in front of my boys so maybe i have more time to kill.

I'll make sure to use no more than three paragraphs from now on, i promise. And no big words like "extraordinary" (hint: it means "really, really").

It's not so much that your post is long, but that it's so much sound and fury, signifying nothing. You go around and around and write so much, but at the end of the day, you're a fucking moron who can't state a point well EVEN WHEN YOU'RE RIGHT. I think this is because you don't really understand what goes into making a movie, comic book, novel, or video game. Let's boil this down.

I say that games made from movies often suck for the reasons Stark reiterated. Low-quality development teams, low budgets, less freedom, and time constraints. You said specifically that these reasons are not enough, that something MORE must be to blame.

I list a bunch of games that succeeded. You move the goalposts. Your resulting definition of a movie game invalidates virtually every game made from a movie in history. You then go on a long involved rant that amounts to "because I said so."

Meanwhile, in all your ranting, you ignored a key point. Video game STORIES. THE STORIES TOLD IN THE GAME. They are rarely ever influenced by player interaction. Note that in most cutscenes, you sit on your ass and WATCH the story unfold. Rare is the game that takes your interaction and uses it to change the story entirely, in fact, I can only really think of maybe two in recent memory that did that, and they both came out in the last five years or so.

So, let's play a game, it's called defend or retract. Your assertion is that it's more than the reasons I've listed above that causes movie games to suck. You blame the "interactive" part of the media. List games that have player interaction beyond "defeat obstacle X to continue" that actually influence the storyline. See, because interaction, the definition of that word? It means that when I do one thing, you do another. When I do something else, you do something different, and so on. It's more than just "turn page/kill enemy/keep eyes open". So let's see it. You said that pretty much all games do this, so let's see it.

Ok see again, i never said that game stories were effected in that way. I said that most game stories are at best a framework the game is built on, not actual stories like, say, the plot of LOTR. You keep saying this about "interactivity affecting the story" and i keep wondering where i gave you that impression. That was never my intent or my argument. I want to be clear if that is what you think i'm arguing, then you're wrong, and actually i admitedly suck at conveying my thoughts so that's probably my fault in retrospect. Look...i can sum up my opinion (and hopfully make it clear) in two paragraphs:

Movies based on games remove the element of games which make them entertaining in the first place: the direct connection to the character. Games strive more and more to become immersive, an overused term but important none the less. Taking away this immersive, personal element makes the flaws in the game--like say the plot or lack thereof--become obvious. Most games, even now, have stories based purely on progressing the gameplay, and with the gameplay removed one either has to rewrite the story (with hit or miss effect) or keep the original story, warts and all. Some games are good enough that this doesn't happen, but that's rare.

Games based on movies typically go the other way. Instead of removing the controlling element they add one where it previously never existed. In many instances this turns impossible scenes more impossible by virtue of making the player slog through them constantly. A perfect example would be, in fact, the game based on King Kong wherein it faithfully reproduced several parts of the movie...but in such a way that it became tiresome and a chore. Depending more heavily on story for entertainment, when the story has to be altered to make it longer or shorter or otherwise different than the movie immediately, things begin to fall apart. It is entirely possible to get this right but difficult at best, and increasingly so.

Look i have to get down to something here at the homestead, and i'll probably be back much later cause i need the computer elsewhere; if you want to continue or whatever, you can PM or wait till tomorrow, or not if you think we're at an impasse or something.

Well at least you're finally getting a clue.

When your primary argument is that it's the interactivity that prevents a story from being told, that means you have an argument that the interactivity affects the story itself, its outcome.

The way it's being told and received by the audience is something else entirely. People reading a book cannot possibly interact with a character the same way they do in a movie, when they can respond to more than just written descriptions of actions, they can respond to the actor's portrayal of actual emotions, yet still the story remains.

What you're now saying is that movies can't convey a story in the same way a game can. Here's a big "no duh" for you. However, the method for conveying a story is not equivalent to the story itself. A story can be told in many ways, and you don't need a particular medium to tell any given story. Now, some mediums are better for some stories than others, but that's another discussion entirely.

18-Till-I-Die wrote:Look i have to get down to something here at the homestead, and i'll probably be back much later cause i need the computer elsewhere; if you want to continue or whatever, you can PM or wait till tomorrow, or not if you think we're at an impasse or something.

...what makes you think I care when you post? Or that I care when you want me to post? Christ, we all have lives. I respond when I have time, and I expect the same of anyone I'm talking to. Shit man, I'm going to be gone all weekend, but I don't expect you to NOT POST because I'm not here.

Fucking hell, I hate it when people do that.

18 what the hell is your malfunction. You say Spider-Man 2 isn't a valid example of a movie-based video game that is good... because it doesn't follow the movie plot exactly?