From silver screen to LCD screen
June 12th 2008 02:36
Note that hand-held video game devices haven’t used LCD screens for many years now. Back when they did, though, developers were already making games based on popular movies and TV shows. Readers familiar with the NES will remember the wildly popular (and wildly difficult) adaptations of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Friday the 13th, as well as the much less popular Predator game. To be entirely fair, there weren’t many good things associated with Predator anyway. The years of the SNES brought us a whole series based on the Star Wars movies, another whole series based on the Alien movies, another Ninja Turtles game (featuring a purple shark guy who I’m positive I never saw in the cartoon), and, for some reason, Shaq Fu. Yes, you heard me correctly – a game based on the rap music of former L.A. Laker Shaquille O’Neal.
Later we got an unsuccessful X-Files PC game, and the N64 classic GoldenEye, and the PSP’s Buffy: Chaos Bleeds, and the god-awful Enter the Matrix and acceptable Path of Neo, and a bunch more that I’ve forgotten.
Making video games based on movies and TV shows is hard. You have to capture the essence of the source in some way, but also make it reasonably entertaining to video game fans. The first step is choosing the correct genre. A Matrix license is not going to work as a Longest Journey-style RPG based on dialogue and clue-searching (unless the point is to hack the system and get Morpheus’ e-mail address – but what do you do after that?). Sadly, the first step is also where most games stumble. Rather than trying to do anything interesting or unique, they tend to default to a platform/arcade format lifted directly from the original Metroid. Jump on ledges, shoot enemies, get an occasional power-up. The only exceptions are usually the sort of franchise where the characters don’t do any shooting and can’t be shoehorned into a situation where they do (which they achieved in the case of Wayne’s World by slapping together something about Wayne and Garth getting sucked into a video game). Sadly, such exceptions are usually ones you probably wouldn’t want to play anyway.
The other trick lazy game designers have learned since the advent of the Nintendo DS is to put a bunch of generic mini-games (mostly non-brand-name adaptations of Sudoku or Tetris) on a cartridge with some cheesecake photos of the movie’s star and call it a licensed product. Hannah Montana, we’re looking in your direction. You can just imagine what they’re going to do with that god-awful remake of Get Smart. Knowing them, it won’t be enough to insult the show and the memory of its star Don Adams (Steve Carell? Are you serious?), they’ll also want to contribute to training the next generation to be as boring as a bag of old socks, by slapping Agent 86’s name on Brain Trainer-style crypto-homework.
Some movies and TV shows have an obvious analogue in the video game world – there was never any doubt that Path of Neo or Chaos Bleeds should be multi-level fighting games, or that GoldenEye should be a hi-tech first-person shooter. Those genres have plenty of clichés of their own, but you should still be thankful when you see a game of that type. It could be so much worse.
Which is scarier: the fact that someone made this game... or the fact that people bought it?
Later we got an unsuccessful X-Files PC game, and the N64 classic GoldenEye, and the PSP’s Buffy: Chaos Bleeds, and the god-awful Enter the Matrix and acceptable Path of Neo, and a bunch more that I’ve forgotten.
Making video games based on movies and TV shows is hard. You have to capture the essence of the source in some way, but also make it reasonably entertaining to video game fans. The first step is choosing the correct genre. A Matrix license is not going to work as a Longest Journey-style RPG based on dialogue and clue-searching (unless the point is to hack the system and get Morpheus’ e-mail address – but what do you do after that?). Sadly, the first step is also where most games stumble. Rather than trying to do anything interesting or unique, they tend to default to a platform/arcade format lifted directly from the original Metroid. Jump on ledges, shoot enemies, get an occasional power-up. The only exceptions are usually the sort of franchise where the characters don’t do any shooting and can’t be shoehorned into a situation where they do (which they achieved in the case of Wayne’s World by slapping together something about Wayne and Garth getting sucked into a video game). Sadly, such exceptions are usually ones you probably wouldn’t want to play anyway.
Which is scarier: the fact that someone made this game... or the fact that people bought it?
The other trick lazy game designers have learned since the advent of the Nintendo DS is to put a bunch of generic mini-games (mostly non-brand-name adaptations of Sudoku or Tetris) on a cartridge with some cheesecake photos of the movie’s star and call it a licensed product. Hannah Montana, we’re looking in your direction. You can just imagine what they’re going to do with that god-awful remake of Get Smart. Knowing them, it won’t be enough to insult the show and the memory of its star Don Adams (Steve Carell? Are you serious?), they’ll also want to contribute to training the next generation to be as boring as a bag of old socks, by slapping Agent 86’s name on Brain Trainer-style crypto-homework.
Accept no substitutes.
Some movies and TV shows have an obvious analogue in the video game world – there was never any doubt that Path of Neo or Chaos Bleeds should be multi-level fighting games, or that GoldenEye should be a hi-tech first-person shooter. Those genres have plenty of clichés of their own, but you should still be thankful when you see a game of that type. It could be so much worse.
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