Video Game Movies Don't Work

So I'm pretty sure this is a point I've made before, but with news of the Warcraft movie on the horizon it's something I feel like I should repeat.  Video game movies do not work, they have never worked and I feel that until I'm proven otherwise, will never work.

Now, does this mean that you can't look at something like the trailer for the Warcraft movie and not be excited?  Well no, if you're a normal punter then you have every right in the world to be excited, I mean their making a movie of fucking Warcraft for God's sake, just expect all that excitement and wonder to fade away once you actually get in the cinema.

What I'm not going to say is that video game movies don't work because of a lack of talent.  Unless you're Uwe Boll, chances are your going to hire some semi decent actors and have a director that has his head screwed on straight, it's just that these kind of movies are doomed from the get go.  This is because video games and movies are two VERY DIFFERENT ways of delivering entertainment and they don't really translate well from one to the other.

Silent Hill is a great example of this because it's a series that I hold so close to my heart that I can easily point out things that are wrong or things that don't work when it's done within a movie.  You see, Silent Hill games are legitimately scary because the effect of the horror when delivered through the game is two fold.  On one level you're scared by things like the sound design, the visual design, the monster design, things in the game that are designed to generate that feeling of fear.  However you're also getting the sense of fear on another level because those things are happening directly to you in a way.  From a game play standpoint you're terrified because you're managing health, ammo or you might be worried about losing progress.  What Team Silent did with the original games is marry those two ideas to create a truly frightening experience.

When you put this into a movie you lose some of what makes Silent Hill special.  Sure, there's freaky shit happening on the screen but you're nothing but a passive observer.  The story must go on because there's still run time in the movie so you essentially lose half of the fear factor.  Silent Hill is sort of a bad example in one respect because the writers idea of "horror" for the movie was a load of crap but I'm sure you see where I'm coming from.

Not only this, but you have to condense a game, which will usually run for 8-10 hours on a first play through in a movie run time of about 2 hours.  I'm sure it's no easy task to adapt something of that length and as a result people who know these games games backwards and front are left disappointing and angry because things were changed and adapted in order to suit the run time of a film.

The same is true for Warcraft, if you just want to see a movies about orcs and humans bashing each other with swords then I'm sure you'll have a good time but all the people who are invested in that series, which is a well fleshed out series, will be left wanting and probably upset.  I'd love them to focus on just a small part of the series and do it really well but even then you'd upset people by not having the same scope that the game series has built up over the years.  The movie is titled Warcraft, not Warcraft: <insert major story event here>.  Even with the title alone you've set the scope too wide and are setting yourself up for failure. 

The same is also true the other way round, video game movies generally suck ass because recreating that experience into a 10 hour game that feels world £40 is really hard.  Not only that but they pretty much have to be made while interest for said movie is high, which means that development is usually rushed and the games suffer mechanically as a result.  It might have been a little easier back in the day with things like Batman because all you had to do was make a platformer with a couple of nods to the movie that you were basing it on but now it's much harder and as a result video game movies are usually regarded with some kind of scorn or are just flat out ignored.

One day I hope I'm wrong about all this and they make an awesome video game movie or vice versa but to me it feels like the mediums are just too different from each other and when you factor in time, cost, manpower and a bunch of other stuff it almost seems futile to try.  All these adaptations suck but I admire peoples willingness to try

Hooked on Hearthstone

I remember when I first saw Hearthstone, I laughed a hearty laughed and said that the idea of a World of Warcraft trading game game was stupid.  Now look at me, sat in front of my computer logging onto Hearthstone daily for a quick round before work every morning like a big fat chump.

Seriously though, I like trading card games like Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh but the idea of having to drop large amounts of money on little bits of paper really turns me off.  That's why this kind of thing in video game format is so appealing; I get to play the game but don't have to drop as much money on it.  However Yu-Gi-Oh games tend to be full of stupid crap and I find the Magic: The Gathering games to be extremely limiting.

Then Hearthstone comes along, which to most TCG snobs may be rather simplistic but it's fast, fun and best of all completely free.  All you have to do is download some Battle.net thing and you're pretty much good to go from there, just log in and get playing.

The game of Hearthstone is rather simple.  You pick a character based on a class from World of Warcraft and use your deck of minions and spells to drain their health from 30 to 0.  Each card has a mana cost from 1 to 10 and each hero has a special skill that costs 2 mana to perform.  For example the Mage can cast a fireball that will deal 1 damage which is great for a little DPS boost if you have some spare mana at the end of your turn.

Every single card available in the game is available for free, there is no jumping through pay gates to get more cards in Hearthstone.  For 150 in game gold you can buy a booster pack that contains 5 cards.  If you want to buy more packs at the same time it costs money, but the game doesn't limit you to how many packs you can buy.  It's a little annoying that you can't stack gold purchases but it's a small inconvenience.  You earn this gold by just playing the game, there is no way to buy gold from the in game store.  Every 3 wins in normal play mode, ranked or not, nets you 10 gold.  This sounds like getting a booster is a slow process but the game gets around this by providing the player with "daily quests".  A daily quest may be something like "win 2 games with X class" or "Kill X Minions" and each completed quest nets you 40 gold.

On top of that you can spend 150 gold to enter The Arena to get even better prizes such as more gold, boosters or dust for crafting.  You keep playing games until you hit either 12 wins or 3 losses, whichever comes first and you have to do it with a deck built out of randomly selected cards.  Even if you don't own the card you can use it in arena mode if you get lucky with the drafting, so really it's up to luck but your rank or anything like that is unaffected and the prizes are really good so it's worth doing.

Finally you can craft cards using some weird crafting system that I've not really used much since I started.  Basically you can disenchant cards you don't want into dust and then use that dust to craft new cards that you do want.  I've not yet played the game long enough to know what specific cards I want for my deck but I imagine this system will become very useful to me later.

So if you like card games I'd absolutely recommend Hearthstone.  Even if you don't like Warcraft, the game itself is fun to play so if you can get over the theme there's a good game here.  Best of all, you have absolutely nothing to lose.  You can play the game for hours and hours and spend 0 money like I have or you can drop a few bucks and get a nice handful of extra cards, but don't be disappointed if those cards don't give you much of an advantage.

Easily one of my favourite games of the year so far.