This was a post I was supposed to make ages ago, but I guess I got distracted by various other bullshit. Anyway, before we begin, watch this video.
This video basically sums up everything wrong with big name game development. All your stuff like this, Uncharted, The Last of Us and many others, while not being bad games by any stretch (although Ryse looks shite) are spending far too much time trying to be movies and not enough time trying to be games.
There's a bit in that video where the guys talking about how the development team are trying to increase the story and characterisation compared to movies. This, my friends, is fucking WRONG. Games are not movies and trying to better stories by making them more movie-esque does not solve the problem.
You see, game story is at it's absolute best when the game play compliments the story, and I'll give you two examples.
Silent Hill 2 is the sort of game that puts the story before it's gameplay, but it still succeeds as a game because the game play of Silent Hill 2 compliments that story. The controls, the combat, the fog along with everything else compliment the story of James Sunderland looking for his dead wife. Those emotions of fear that you feel as you wander through the town aren't felt because the game is forcing it down you with huge set pieces, it's because you are immersed in the game itself and the overall game feel is impacting how you feel. What I mean by this is that you're not scared of Pyramid Head because James is like "OH MY GOD LOOK AT THE BIG SCARY MONSTER!!", you're scared by it because it's this big lumbering strangely shaped thing carrying a big knife that is A) Visually intimidating and B) Comes with the prospect of you having to reload a save.
Compare that with Silent Hill downpours mine cart sequence where it's a load of big flasy lights and effects on rails basically screaming at you "BE SCARED NOW! GO ON! DO IT!"
The other example I've got for you is Shadow of the Colossus
Shadow of the Colossus is the other example of a successful video game with a good story because in this games case, the story IS the game play. You are basically plonked into a world that tells you that if you wanna revive the girl, go kill a load of giants. You then experience the story visually as you kill each boss, explore the lands and watch the main character get increasingly beat up as he progresses and not once does it feel like you're playing a movie. All the emotions you feel as part of SotC's storyline are felt because they are happening directly to you. Fear, victory, sadness, excitement are all felt as part of this game because they are what YOU feel as you confront an enemy and figure out and effective way to get to his weak spot. The excitement you feel for that final boss and ending is something that YOU feel because you have come to the end of a long and arduous task that YOU have completed, not because a cut scene hypes the fight for you.
Ryse and a lot of AAA games on the other hand just lead you by the nose, the emotions are felt by the characters in the story and not by the player at all. The player in games like Uncharted aren't being engaged by game play or game feel, they are just there for the ride, just to watch, like a movie!
Nothing inherently wrong about these kind of games but I feel like developers aren't using the medium to its fullest potential and are settling for a lazy way out by just trying to imitate the movie industry rather than pushing the bar and trying to deliver on deeper interactivity that compliments their story lines.
Ryse is doing it completely wrong by not only trying to be a movie, but basically removing game play by filling itself with QTE and massive set pieces that you have no real control of.
So while I was digging around the internet for gaming related things, I came across at article on Gamespot that said "Shadow of the Colossus movie gets Hanna writer" here is the original article
Now I've never seen Hanna or anything else written by the guy but the fact that this game is getting a movie upsets me, and it upsets me greatly, so let me tell you why.
This will not work as a movie, it just wont. Think about the game itself, it's a dude running around, not saying anything, killing huge things to resurrect a dead girl. How the fuck do you turn THAT into a movie that lasts at least an hour twenty? If anything OTHER than that, is the plot of your movie, you are going to piss people off.
But games of movies are almost always awful, right? On top of that, games of movies are also pretty shitty for the most part, so why is this? Well for the answer lets look to Wagner!
This is a guy who would write music and opera and shit like that, and he basically came up with an idea known as Gesamkunstwerk, which is German for "Complete work of art". Now I'm not super clued up on this whole thing, but the way I understand it is with something like Opera, if the music, sets, actors etc. etc. all come together in harmony, then it makes something really fuckin' good.
So that idea can be applied to this! The reason game movies suck so bad is because you're talking away the whole GAME bit, and you're ruining the experience as a result. The same goes the other way round, you have to change bits of a movie to make it a game, so you piss off fans of the movie, and gamers don't like it either because usually the game sucks ass.
The reason Shadow of the Colossus is so damn good, is because all the elements of that game make it so. You take away the whole gameplay bit, the whole bit that makes you sympathise with just how hard this guys fuckin' job is, then you're taking away from the experience, and you're going to be left with a steaming piece of shit most likely.
So please, for the love of God, if you really are planning to make a movie of this game, FUCKING DON'T!
The same friend that told me to try and beat Super Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back told me to hop on this one straight after, and really I wished he'd told me about this one first.
Indiana Jones: Greatest Adventures is a platformer for the Super Nintendo, but unlike the Super Star Wars games, where the three movies were split into separate titles, Indiana Jones just has 3 movies worth of games on one cart.
The game itself is sort of boring, but I'll tell you right now that it's a damn sight better than Super Star Wars despite being made by the same people. The controls are a lot tighter, and it's easier to see whats hitting you, so you don't get the same level of bullshit rando-deaths that you did with ESB. On the flip side, the game is WAYYYY too easy and all the bosses are, for lack of a better word, crap.
Still, if you like Indiana Jones and you don't want to rip your hair out I'd say its worth emulating or hunting down in a used book store whatever. In terms of movie games you could do way worse than this. Unlike a lot of movie franchises, Indy got some love and playing out some of the scenes from the movie was pretty fun.
There isn't really much else to say really, the game is just so "standard" and nothing really sticks out. Not shit enough to get riled about and not good enough to get excited.
What you are looking at in the opening picture today, is the end credits for Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. That's right folks, despite a lot of complaining about it in various posts over the last few weeks, I finally beat this fucking thing, so I thought I'd give a little review.
Well first of all, I was describing the goings on to a buddy of mine via facebook chat, and the impression I got from him was that this game doesn't really do a good job of following the movies too closely. Some of the core scenes are there, but it does a lot of stuff to sort of "game" it up, which is fine I guess. When making a side scrolling platformer you can't really expect it to be too faithful, as long as it's fun really.
So that's the big question here, is it fun? Well to be perfectly honest with you, for me, yes, for most people, probably not. This game is HARD, and when I say hard, I mean that unless you play a level perfectly this game will shaft you up the ass so hard that you will not be able to walk for days. The checkpoints in some stages can be really unforgiving, especially in the final level.
My two major complaints however, do not lie with unforgiving checkpoints or game difficulty, but with taking damage and boss life bars. When you take damage you dont fly back like you do it games like Castlevania, you get pushed back. This is fine, but in some situations the whole being pushed thing will fuck with the controls and you'll die for stupid reasons because the enemy has been placed somewhere really obnoxious. When it comes to bosses, their health bars are just flat out too big. These make easy bosses really tough because it turns into an endurance match rather than a test of your accumulated skill. The most bullshit example is that bogmonster I posted a while back, which required you to shave off bits of his body before you could even touch his main health bar, he wasn't tough, just resilient as fuck.
In the end though, the game is pretty fun, but if you want to win you have to be one hell of a patient player with a high tolerance level for bullshit. If you like a challenge then go emulate it or find a cart or something but if super hard games aren't your thing, no matter how much you like Star Wars this one is just not for you.
So a while ago before I came out to Japan I played through a game on the Xbox 360 called Asura's Wrath. I'm not exactly going to "review" the whole thing here, but it was a strange little game as there was very little actual game to be had in Asura's Wrath. The whole game is a series of quick time events and little beat em up segments that are piss easy and require no real effort or strategy on your part even on hard mode.
Despite all that though, I quite enjoyed Asura's Wrath, it was cinematic and the story was interesting and watching a very angry man punch a God the size of earth in the face was quite entertaining, I'll do a full review thingy later.
Anyway, the thought I had about this game, was that maybe, the guys over at Capcom have discovered a way to make movie games good. You see, for those of you who may not be aware, 99% games based on movies are fantastically bad and equate to nothing but cheap cash ins from developers and no one is happy with this crap. You go and see a movie, probably a marvel superhero movie or whatever, and then you see the game and if you're really stupid you go and drop money on the game and shortly after you pop it in your machine you want to kill yourself in some kind of extremely painful way for falling for that crap.
lol movie games
By the way, I didn't buy Thor, but it was the worst recent movie game I could think of.
Anyway, what I thought when playing Asura's Wrath was, that what if you make all movie games like this one?! For example, take the Iron Man games, right now, they suck massive sweaty balls, but if you turned it into an Asura's Wrath clone, it would actually be pretty good, or at least playable. On top of that, recreating scenes from the movies (what most people who buy these games actually want) would be really easy.
So in short, since Asura's Wrath feels more like a movie than a game, the best way to make passable movie games would be to just remake the movie but add timed button presses. Asura's Wrath was never a movie to start with, which is what kept it interesting, so these games would still be arsebags, but I bet people would feel a little less ripped off if they were made this way as apposed to a buggy rushed mess.
