Hulk Smash! Lacks Subtlety

Joshuah Bearman's, over at the LA Weekly, continues to impress with his 'Pass the Paddles' column. This week he offers up an analysis of why 'Hulk Smash' needs a little more thought put into it. From the article: "If superhero games are so often terrible, it's because they're saddled with the flattening reductionism of superhero film adaptations. But superheroes aren't so simple. The principal disappointment with the film version of The Hulk was that it lacked the mythical gravitas, graceful action and ultimate spiritual reward of Ang Lee's previous masterpiece, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The film Hulk's oedipal and rage complexes were ham-fisted, and the action boringly brutish. In other words: Crouching Tiger was a better superhero story. (And should have made a better video game; sadly, that title was a disaster.)"

Re:Teh fr0sty p1ss!

[Fr05t]

That is a lie! I gave you none of my piss!

Should've gone back to the comics

[tepples]

Many players would call GoldenEye 007 for Nintendo 64 the Best Movie To Game Conversion Evar(tm). It was greatly improved by the fact that the level designers took a lot of their cues from John Gardner's novelization [amazon.com], filling out details that were only implied in the movie. Likewise, the developers of Hulk video games could have referred to the comics.

Re:Should've gone back to the comics

[game kid]

I'm sure the (somewhat slow) 4-player-split-screen and wide choice of vaguely-familiar/super-cool weapons helped them too. Sure helped when people came to my place.

That's the problem. Newer games try to act like movies instead of, uh, games. I played 007 and the story didn't get in the way of 1-player mode so much, and there is the obvious joy from catching player 4 with a nice snipe or headshot (it never really felt that way for me with online games). With new games, there's such a focus on plot tha

Re:Should've gone back to the comics

[Intellectual Elitist]

> Likewise, the developers of Hulk video games could have referred to the comics.

Yeah, really. They could have maybe gotten someone like Paul Jenkins, who'd actually written the Hulk comic before, to work on the game [newsarama.com] with them. And maybe even base the game off of one of his comic book storylines [powells.com]. And they could have even gone the extra mile and done a comic book miniseries based on the game [marvel.com]. Oh, wait -- they already did.

Granted, Jenkins was hardly the best writer the Hulk had ever seen, and the t

Exactly!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, a game like this should allow the player to get into the head of the superhero. They should understand Hulk's motivation for smashing. What is he trying to accomplish by smashing? Without that kind of deeper interaction with the character, superhero games will always seem like a pale shadow of the stories we all know.

Re:Exactly!

[Feanturi]

Brain uplink established - transmitting...

** Hulk SMASH!!!! **

-Why does Hulk smash?

** Hunh?!?! Hulk head make funny sound. Hulk SMASH!!!!! **

Uplink terminated

Jack Thompson has an apoplexy

[DrSkwid]

Marvel Comics Presents Hulk Smash: A game where you play a giant monster that goes on a oedipal rage driven killing spree. Go for teh win by killing your father and fucking your mother.

ESRB : teen

yeah, sure, go for it

=)

Despite my best efforts...

[Strell]

Fitting in with my roommates continues to be quite a chore. It...confounds me!

Bonus points if you get the reference (I'm hoping /.ers would know).

Re:Despite my best efforts...

[snuf23]

Dishes all done!

And you were expecting...?

[SleepyHappyDoc]

The title 'Hulk Smash' doesn't come off as being all that subtle.

Re:And you were expecting...?

[amrust]

Was 'Hulk Smash' meant as a joke? Because I don't see anything called that, in TFA. And I didn't know the game based on the movie was all that bad.

The Freudian interpretation of Hulk's failure...

[Chaffar]

A monstrous green corporealized Id with torn-up cutoffs is fairly pointless without the fragile Ego from which it sprang.

Actually, another reason why the game would suck is because of (for those that didn't catch on yet) the "movie-to-game conversions must suck" convention of 1984 also known as the Ghostbusters [wikipedia.org] rule. I don't think Hulk sucked because of the way the psychology of Bruce Banner was interpreted by the both the movie and video game directors.

The film Hulk's oedipal and rage complexes were ham

Re:The Freudian interpretation of Hulk's failure..

[Lord Bitman]

"movie-to-game conversions must suck"
The parts of spiderman 2 which didnt involve the movie were good!

Re:The Freudian interpretation of Hulk's failure..

[Corbu Mulak]

You mean except for the Mysterio parts? Worst. Level Design. Ever.

Re:The Freudian interpretation of Hulk's failure..

[Lord Bitman]

mostly I meant "as a racing game with a spiderman instead of a car, it's good"

Re:The Freudian interpretation of Hulk's failure..

[Stormwatch]

the "movie-to-game conversions must suck" convention of 1984 also known as the Ghostbusters rule

Sega's Ghostbusters for the Genesis, however, was a pretty good game.

Re:The Freudian interpretation of Hulk's failure..

[Jarlsberg]

But Ghostbuster was a cool game. Come on, you got to drive around NY and capture ghosts. It even had a bit of speech thrown in. I dug it when I had my C64. No, sucky movie conversions started with ET, and then every once in a while, we got some good ones, like Ghostbusters.

Hulk comments on Puny Human Review

[Hulkster]

Hulk not like it too much either.
Hulk SMASH Puny Human LA Weekly!

Re:Any comments from someone who has played it?

[babylonian007]

I agree with what you said completely. He's clearly taking video games as a whole too damn seriously. It's a fun, mindless game that gives you more freedom of movement than any Spider-Man game could ever hope to. I'm sure the jackass who wrote this article wouldn't hesitate one bit to sing the praises of the escapist 'King Kong' movie that just came out.

Hulk: Ultimate Destruction is raw, unabridled entertainment and definitely worth a rental if you aren't too hung up on your own pseudointellectualism to enj

ZOUNDS!

[Deitheres]

You mean that a game titled "Hulk Smash" lacks subtlety? With a name like that, I thought Bruce Banner would be reading Shakespeare or something... ;-)

hulk movie

[bigdavex]

The principal disappointment with the film version of The Hulk was that it lacked the mythical gravitas, graceful action and ultimate spiritual reward of Ang Lee's previous masterpiece, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The film Hulk's oedipal and rage complexes were ham-fisted, and the action boringly brutish. In other words: Crouching Tiger was a better superhero story.

My principal dispapointment with the movie was the Hulk looked dumb and the pacing was bad.

Re:hulk movie

[Scrameustache]

My principal dispapointment with the movie was the Hulk looked dumb

Because he always looked so smart and sophisticated before? ;-)
I thought he looked big and green, which is fine, I was disapointed that he didn't kill a single person in that whole movie. He kills a couple of giant mutant dogs, and a few people die of their own follis in his presence, but the Hulk himself killed no one.

Hulk is supposed to be like an anthopomorphic natural disaster, causing material destruction and death wherever he turns up

Write your own movie, then.

[VGR]

For some reason, the Hulk movie is a movie people love to hate. I liked it. Sure, it isn't perfect, but it's damn good.

Leave it to an LA publication to compare it to Crouching Tiger. If there's a place where people are in love with rehashing the same thing until it's run into the ground, it's LA. "Take no risks! Just write and direct another Crouching Tiger!"

The movie isn't like like Crouching Tiger because Ang Lee didn't want to make another Crouching Tiger. God, it's like people telling Robin Williams to do some Mork lines.

I do feel like Banner's repressed violence should have been portrayed more subtly, but we all know how things like that hit the cutting room floor. Critics may be won over by subtlety, but general audiences can barely spell the word.

To stay on topic... I very much agree with his assessment on the games. The Banner element is good as long it's not more than a tiny part of the gameplay. For instance, I might like a game where you play as the Hulk constantly but are haunted by Banner's thoughts and must piece them together. And obviously just smashing a city is going to wear thin, for players over the age of ten. A really successful game will be one that can find a balance.

A response to Eberts Critizism of videogames?

[darkmayo]

Usually when we see a video game review its a break down of the actual gameplay/graphics and whatnot, yet this one came at it by taking about the in game story and drawing comparisons to recent "The Hulk" movie directed by Ang Lee.

Not something you see very often which leads me to believe this was an attempt to view video games more than just a game in an attempt to legitamize the media as being an artform, which recently Roger Ebert stated video games could never be because of no real authorative.

I recall

Games are about gameplay.

[MaWeiTao]

Hulk Smash was a weak game, not because it lacked subtlety, but because it wasn't sufficiently fun. Like most games derived from movies it's just an attempt to cash in on the movie's success, and developers rarely seem to put much effort into these sorts of games.

As for the movie itself, I see no justifiable reason to compare The Hulk to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Those are entirely different movies. And while I enjoyed Crouching Tiger very much, I don't think it's the be all and end all of action movi

Re:Games are about gameplay.

[Vacuous]

We have the next-generation console developers spewing marketing crap that hardware advancements are going to open up new vistas in gaming

Seems to me like Microsoft is well on their way to that.

Hulk: Ultimate Destruction

[sesshomaru]

Well, first of all, The Hulk has always been one of my favorite superheroes. When I was a kid, one of my favorite Hulk comics involved the Hulk versus Tyrannus, at least one comic in that story line was called Sic Semper Tyrannus! [leaderslair.com]. The fun thing, for me, about those comics was that here you have one of these Dr. Evil type villains, Tyrannus, with his over complicated plans and constant monologuing [mindspring.com] versus the Hulk, a childlike giant with devestating strength, "Hulk is the strongest one there is." It's f

My own thoughts

[LordZardoz]

I think that the Hulk movie failed because it took entirely the wrong approach to the character.

Audiences were expecting to see a large green giant kick ass all over the place. This did not quite happen. We got a few decent action sequences, but the villian, and the primary conflict, just did not deliver on the expectations we needed.

I think that the movie would have done better if they had made the movie focus on Banners guilt for the damange caused by the Hulks rampages. It also would have been intrest