Why Video Game Movie Adaptations Need New Respect 283
An anonymous reader writes "Hollywood has yet to find any video game property it is willing to treat with the same respect as J.R.R. Tolkien or J.K.Rowling, arguably still following the principles that led to the appalling Super Mario Bros. movie in 1992: 'A game lacks the complexity that a movie requires.' Yet a modern gaming masterpiece such as Mass Effect has the depth and breadth to deserve better treatment in the proposed trilogy. Is Hollywood again going to disrespect fans who, in this case, have as much right to see a good plot respected as the readers of Lord Of The Rings? This article discusses why and how Hollywood should grow up regarding these adaptations."
Respect? (Score:4, Insightful)
Where was Hollywood respect when they were talking about dwarf tossing?
Hollywood only cares about making money so they can throw some ewoks into a movie to sell some extra toys to kids they will.
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yeah, the last thing that comes to mind when thinking of the LOTR movies is "respect for the original plot". I understand that a movie can only be so long before your audience falls asleep, but hand waving saruman away with a one-liner and instead tacking on 10 minutes of happy ending, fade out, happy ending, fade out was a slap in the face to anyone who read the actual books
The LOTR movies might be enjoyable in their own right, but they dont do justice to the original work by Tolkien
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All (most?) of those happy endings were actually in the books. It's just that they still had quite a bit of story in between them, and that got skipped. If you skip the story leading up to it, you'd better skip the ending too.
I don't mind that some stuff got cut. And some of the additions were brilliant even! (The ring is much scarier and has real personality in the movie.) The problem is that also some unnecessary nonsense was added, and some of the cuts necessitated more cuts that weren't made. It's still
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Director hubris. They think they can make classic works even better, because they are such great directors.
I understood moving pieces around to fit into three three-hour movies, but changing stuff and adding stupid love stories to make them more suitable to American Viewing Audiences was just dumb.
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George Lucas only cares about making money so he can throw some ewoks into a movie to sell some extra toys to kids.
FTFY.
Right? (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems there is a heavy feeling of entitlement as far as media and the arts go here.
Like people often say here, ideas are a dime a dozen. The implementation is the hard part.
Re:Right? (Score:5, Insightful)
I had a similar thought to yours when I read the story heading. The only time that comic books got decent adaptations were from people who really loved them. Why did it take decades for many good comic based movies to be made after their original stories have long sit idle? Because the people who pitch and produce passionate and -good- adaptations of these stories needed to grow up first. Plus, having a good history of success making comic movies has made it easier for the pay masters to open their wallets to the idea of comic movies. Video game based adaptations will have their days, but they will need those few first break-away hits to make people stand up and notice. Wing commander and company were not these success stories, alas.
Re:Right? (Score:4, Interesting)
It wasn't fantastic but it was quite true to the feel of the original game: the silent hill movie adaption.
I imagine that video game adaptions fall prey to the same problems that book adaptions do: if the author doesn't give a damn then it gets turned into a generic crap hollywood film.
A production company was put together and there was US and Scandinavian and European involvement, and I wrote a couple of script drafts which wet down well and everything was looking fine and then the US people said 'Hey, we've been doing market research in Power Cable, Nebraska, and other centes of culture, and the Death/skeleton bit doesn't work for us, it's a bit of a downer, we have a prarm with it, so lose the skeleton". The rest of the consortium said, did you read the script? The Americans said: sure, we LOVE it, it's GREAT, it's HIGH CONCEPT. Just lose the Death angle, guys. Whereupon, I'm happy to say, they were told to keep on with the medication and come back in a hundred years. -- Terry Pratchett
now anyone familiar with the book will know from this that the person across the table didn't even read the back of the book or even the first 2 lines of the back of the book, to quote them here for anyone not familiar with professor terry Pratchett works:
Mort has been chosen as Death's apprentice. He gets board and lodging and free use of company horse, and doesn't even need time off for his grandmother's funeral.
and there's so many crappy directors who just keep making the same film over and over, if given a story they chop off everything which doesn't fit their one and only story and then nail the 2 together poorly.
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Ideas are indeed a dime a dozen, but we're talking about already successful ideas with existing fan-bases.
Personally I think the problem is that people try to make a movie based on a video game, rather than making a movie based on characters, setting, and plot.
There is often the same issue with games based on movies, and they usually suck just as much as the game-to-movie attempts.
Don't make a movie of a game, just make a movie.
Don't make a game of a movie, just make a game.
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You could make a movie that's inspired by a game, or loosely based on it. Take the characters, the main gist of the "plot" and maybe even the look, but adapt it in a way more suited to the cinema.
Of course, then everyone will complain about the discrepancies/inaccuracies/inconsistencies or whatever. OMG not canon oneleventyone!!!!
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Tomb Raider worked well enough. No idea how far it strayed from the original, as I haven't played it, but Indiana Jones-clone-with-hot-chick-and-SFX-overdose is a perfectly valid movie concept, apparently.
Except it doesn't actually happen (Score:2)
You mean like how everyone complained about Knights Of The Old Republic not being yet another dumb merchandising exercise of the movie characters? Oh, wait, they didn't. It actually received high praise, several awards, and was described as one of the most influential pieces of work of the Star Wars universe. And it sold a metric buttload of copies too.
And it actually did b
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If you want someone to make a movie the way you want to see it, become a director.
Even that didn't work for video games, see the Wing Commander movie.
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Mass Effect (Score:3)
The first Mass Effect was the business, story wise. Deeply thought out, self consistent world, interesting characters, a shadowy nemesis and a basically solid beginning, middle and end. Everything Hollywood needs to make a great movie.
But Mass Effect 2, though technically speaking a better game, definitely fared worse on the plot. The plot in ME2 suffered heavily from being wrapped around a fairly trivial design doc and didn't really have any beginning as such. Basically: hero dies, is rescued by an enigmatic terrorist leader with access to incredible resources, who tells him to recruit the most badass characters in the galaxy to fight an alien menace. 90% of the game involves this "recruitment". It's a race against the clock but nobody demonstrates any sense of urgency at all. There's never a "well, he'll do, let's get going!" to be heard. Once you have some arbitrary number of characters you jump through a wormhole, fight some baddies and blow up a space station. Fin.
There's some other stuff in there that advances the plot of the trilogy as a whole, but it's pretty weak.
Basically, if the author of TFA is hoping that Mass Effect will become a successful video game/movie crossover franchise, he'd better hope they only try and do it to the first game.
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As with movie sequels often the original writers were not planning to write one but commercial pressures demand they do. Sequels are often pretty poor for that reason.
Games are slowly getting better, using proper script writers and trying to make vocal work easier for the actors. Actors in games have a particularly hard time because they tend to end up in a sound recording booth reciting lines that have little context. Even with animated movies there is a fixed plot and some character development. Most game
Re:Mass Effect (Score:4, Interesting)
After our hero is introduced and the scene set, it's then broken into "episodes" which are heavily focused on one member of the "cast", who the rest of the time just stay in the background and throw in the occasional quip. Every now and again throw in a plot advancing episode to keep things ticking over, and finish with beating on a Big Bad. But be sure to wrap up with a bit of a cliffhanger to ensure people are hyped for the next sesaon.
The actual plot of any given episode, most of the time, is immaterial - any events which happen in a character episode are expected to be contained within that episode, and exist only to frame character development or provide obstacles for them to overcome. Since most games follow the movie template, it does feel very different to play, but not necessarily worse - the focus on characterisation did pay off, I feel. Still not perfect, but then nor is the characterisation in most good TV series either.
Sadly, having said all that, I do agree that it wouldn't work as well as a movie, which does make me concerned about the quality of any adapation, since it's going to have to stray pretty far from the plot to fit it into a movie-shaped box.
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Computer games with A-grade plots are extremely rare. Mostly, you want stuff to do, so there's a quest and maybe a bunch of side quests. Meet people, explore new areas, talk a bit here and there, and kill stuff. Unless your name is Lord of the Rings, people have done this before and done it better. You're going to get a B-movie at best.
Very, very few games have more interesting plots than that. Planescape: Torment stands out here. Maybe the original Fallout games. Half-Life perhaps. I can't think of anythin
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Though, to be fair, ME1's plot is pretty B-grade when you look at it closely...and this is coming from somebody who has played both games to excess.
Bingo. As a movie, Mass Effect would be at best a Sci-Fi channel B-movie with Bruce Campbell.
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In videogames, the protagonist is the player. (Score:2)
Movies are tales can be written down in 2 pages, maybe one.
Games are interactive experience, that often have worldbuilding.
Games are not tryiing to write a story, but can be the result, would be a side effect of the worldbuilding and gameplay.
There are games that have zero lore, and zero story to it. Think... Minecraft.
But is this important? Not, because you can make a awesome movie inspired in Minecraft. Key word here is inspired. The less material Minecraft have, the better movie a inspired moviemaker h
I'm still waiting for Solitaire (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:I'm still waiting for Solitaire (Score:5, Funny)
"A touching film of humanity at its best when all the cards are down..."
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They managed to make Doom into a movie, so solitaite should be a walk in the park
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Re:I'm still waiting for Solitaire (Score:5, Funny)
In a world where the deck is stacked against him. One man chooses to deal himself a new hand of cards...
Pac Man: The Motion Picture (Score:3, Funny)
Haunted by the ghosts of his past, lost in a maze of madness, a man turns to pills...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14KwzYBjm-8 [youtube.com]
All I get is a video about being blown up.
OH you meant minesweeper not minecraft, silly me. It's still the same either way however.
Was Lara Croft Tomb Raider adaptation of a game? (Score:2)
If so, it had a good budget, effects and commercial success.
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It also had breasts, which in male geek (and partial female geek) culture, makes a reasonable substitute for plot and character development.
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It also had breasts, which in male geek (and partial female geek) culture, makes a reasonable substitute for plot and character development.
And THAT is what I am calling Angelina's breasts from now on. As in: "Did you see the Plot and Character Development in Cyborg 2, classic."
No more Uwe (Score:4, Insightful)
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Uwe's boxing won't do much good against an angry mob of 800,000 angry nerds.
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Hush now. Postal was awesome.
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Boll might be a dick towards mainline hollywood directors, but they deserve it, because they are "fucking retards".
Uncharted (Score:3)
At which point you have to ask: "Why bother?"
Oh yes, it's the money you can scalp from disappointed fans. Great.
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Oh yes, it's the money you can scalp from disappointed fans. Great.
So watch the trailers, read some reviews, and it if looks like it's crap, don't watch it.
Scalp? No one is forcing you to spend your money just because you like the game.
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Scalp? No one is forcing you to spend your money just because you like the game.
Oh behave. I rarely watch video game movies and I can't remember ever seeing one at the cinema. Like most of the Slashdot crowd, I'm very selective about all my spending and research everything from films to games to washing mashines before parting with my money.
But let's not kid ourselves that all consumers will ever be like that. Or that those who don't research a film before going to see it deserve to be ripped off by a film that solely relies on a name borrowed from a previously successful video gam
Respect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Respect that respected Science Fiction authors get when their thought provoking stories are turned into action flicks with rappers?
Respect Tolkien got when Elves appeared at Helms Deep?
Hollywood knows about respect, it is what is underneath their boots.
And what do you expect when they serve an audience that thinks Mass Effect has depth? What depth? Evil monster with no motivation appears and gets blown up by equally unmotivated guy/gal. Great literature this does NOT make. Granted it has depth if you grew up on superman comics but then Hollywood got you well covered.
Games to movies rarely will work because most games are simply NOT about story. Tomb Raider? It is about solving the puzzles and making the jumps. As much as I would like to see a well proportioned woman spending an hour and half flexing her body on the silver screen, it would have any depth. Except maybe her cleavage.
Tomb Raider, Doom, Mario Brothers: These are games, you play them for the game. NOT the story. Trying to bolt a story on top that becomes 90% of the content instead of 10% is going to require addition of stuff the player simply does not want. Case in point: Lara Croft in the original is a rather bland character with no boyfriend or past. In the movie she suddenly gets a love interest. HELLO! She was supposed to be MY fantasy, not some other guy.
But in a game, this doesn't matter. The little we know about the game Lara Croft is plenty, but jumped up movie directors think they GOT to tell a story. That is were Hollywood keeps going wrong, they still don't get that what they could produce is eye-candy porn. Take Transforms (please). Remove the humans and just gives us 1.5 hours of robots fighting. Zero attempt at story and even less at badly acted out emotions. I liked revenge of the fallen, just fastforward when a human shows up.
Tomb Raider the Story does not work. Tomb Raider the action-adventure does, but focus on action, not bolted on "depth". Give me a mindless 2D movie where I can park my brain at the door and just enjoy myself.
Hollywood isn't ruining game movies by not adding enough depth, but by adding to much. Pure 100% action, that is why I play games, add this to game movies and you are golden.
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That is were Hollywood keeps going wrong, they still don't get that what they could produce is eye-candy porn.
I take it you've not watched Avatar then.
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For example Citizen Kane: A man dies and a reporter makes a documentation about him.
War of the worlds: Aliens attack Earth.
Pulp Fiction: Two hitmen have a variety of amusing misadventures, as has a boxer.
While I wouldn't say that, for instance, Mass Effect has the most complex of plots I would call it on par with what passes as a plot in your average Hollywood movie. (The ones above not neccessarily included.) Wh
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And here we are talking about only video games. What about "Chess, the movie" and "Chess II, return of the King."
I take it that you've never seen Chess: The Musical? Quite good, actually - Nobody's Side is one of my favorite songs. You've probably at least heard One Night in Bangkok before (aka: the song that financed the musical, in popular mythology at least).
Now planescape torment (Score:2)
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WTF!? (Score:4, Insightful)
The vast majority of games out there don't have enough plot to fill a matchbox. How exactly are they worthy of extra respect versus any random short-story?
Really, Super Mario Bros. the movie was very close to the spirit of the games (light entertainment) and had more plot that all the games put together.
Just because some games have a bunch of fanboys out there doesn't mean that they or their game are worthy of special respect.
Might as well complain that movies about popular sports like football (the American one and the Rest Of The World one) don't show enough respect for the game - at least there are more fans for any of of those sports than there are for any specific computer game.
Sorry, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Any game that has a story good enough to be told well in a movie should have been a movie in the first place.
I play games for the gameplay, not some damn story that interrupts gameplay (you know, the reason we play games in the first place?) every ten seconds.
We need a gaming crash like we had in the US in the mid-80s again. Sadly this won't happen because modern gamers would actually *like* E.T. and give it "Game of the Year."
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I play games for the gameplay, not some damn story that interrupts gameplay
It sounds like the story-driven games you've been playing are the Squaresoft ones. Good story-driven games work the story in organically, not through Square's bullshit 70/30 cutscene-to-play ratio.
Hollywood directors? Respect? Since when! (Score:2)
...have as much right to see a good plot respected as the readers of Lord Of The Rings?
The movies for Lord Of The Rings had many parts cut and bits moved around here and there. In particular a huge chunk of the Two Towers was cut. The plot was not set in stone and unchanged.
Don't get me wrong, Peter Jackson did a wonderful job. There were some changes that I really don't like though.
So with that said, don't expect Hollywood to treat any story with respect. They just do what they want.
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There's no way in the world to fit the LotR books in their entirety in a trilogy, so many parts had to get cut.
agreed, but they made some pretty damn awefull cutting decisions, in RotK, Sarumans role is completely cut, and his name is mentioned once or so when gandalf happens to pass by isengard, a whole 20 seconds of Saruman related stuff. His entire coup of the shire at the end is cut, and replaced by: happy hobbit homecomming *fade out* happy hobbit party *fade out* happy hobbit wedding *fade out* happy hobbit baby shower *fade out ad nauseam*. I remember sitting in the theatre almost getting up everytime it fade
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Can we define it by what it isn't? Dwarf tossing & surfboarding elves for starters.
Hollywood is making a film out of Battleship (Score:2)
Next will be Tic-Tac-Tow
Anyone who is looking for "respect" in Hollywood deserves the respect that the upcoming "Yogi Bear" CGI animation deserves. Or Garfield or the TWO chipmunk movies had.
I'd tell the poster to grow up, but that would require leaving their parent's basement, which would be hard for a person over the age of 25 who has never had a real job and has as their most prized possession a collection of McDonald's Happy Meals fig
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Well, they took a few liberties with the game, but there's already been a movie about it [imdb.com].
Hollywood doesn't give a flying fuck. (Score:2)
Re:Hollywood doesn't give a flying fuck. (Score:4, Funny)
Nerd rage is the best rage.
for what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Can we keep seperate types of art seperate? There is no need to unify everything, just for the sake of doing it. The Mona Lisa is a great painting, I'm sure a novel about it would suck. Some books don't make good movies, and many movies would suck in book form. Likewise, while a few games make good movies and vice versa, the usual case is that they don't, so why try?
A movie is first and foremost about storytelling, in a carefully set up series of scenes, with a dramatic curve and a specific ending that everything in the movie is subtly linked to so that near the end you get the feeling of everything falling together like the pieces of a puzzle. Well, good movies anyway. It's about changing perspective, it can tell the story from various angles, leave storylines hanging for a while then return to them - there is a lot in the way how the story is told, in pacing and in letting the viewer know more than the protagonists on the screen.
Games are about decisions, reactions, about finding out clues and hints and about consequences. You are the protagonist, so even if they include cinematics of the evil guy planning his next move, the protagonist then knows about it. The pacing depends on you more than on the story. There are usually multiple routes and endings. It is a lot more about your character than about the story. And one of the challenges is that even the most meaningless random encounter could kill you, while in the movies we all know the hero never gets hurt except by the bad guy himself or one of his leutenants. All the nameless "random encounter" guys are just there as targets.
A good movie and a good game are not made following the same recipe. A good movie about a game, or a good game about a movie, will have little in common except the setting. Example: The Aliens and the Predator movies, and the AvP games (don't get me started about the AvP movies, they were crap). Great movies, great games, exactly because the games did not try to copy the movies but created their own world within the movie setting.
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Can we keep seperate types of art seperate? There is no need to unify everything, just for the sake of doing it. The Mona Lisa is a great painting, I'm sure a novel about it would suck..
Ah, so you're familiar with Dan Brown's work then?
In the year 3000... (Score:2, Interesting)
Movies will *be* video games, so who cares?
gamers == readers (Score:2)
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Gamers tend to have that higher standard as well, and they will always expect more from something that adapts from what they are used to.
Kind of, thats why good video game movies don't adopt an already existing story, but write a new one in the same universe. Resident Evil: Degeneration and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children do that and they are as a result fine video game movies. The trouble with adoption is that you have to rewrite, reinvent and just change stuff around that people are already deeply familiar with and while one can't avoid that in a book, it just feels out of places in games where the source material already is in no small
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Resident Evil is originally a novel, no?
No, novels were made from the game, not the game from novels.
The problem is the "interpretations" (Score:2)
Not hard (Score:2)
You could make a movie out of Half-life 2. Or even the original Half-life. It's not difficult at all. You have established characters, half-decent plot, tons of special-FX opportunities, at least an hour and a half of actual movement and things happening and people explaining plot, characters and sub-plots all the way through, and it fits in well with other movies which have (to be honest) not dissimilar plots, scenes, dialogue, etc.
But then you'd have to find someone who knew that game well enough to di
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I like your rant, but I'd also like to point out that there is plenty of "good" stuff (TV and film) being made these days. Just because Hollywood is shoving crap down our throats left and right doesn't mean there isn't anything else - if you ignore the crap (which is incredibly easy to do) you'll find some good stuff. And more often than not, the good stuff is widely recognized as good. The latest 3D CGI-fest may do well for a couple of weeks with the under-25 crowd (with some exceptions that do really well
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There have been plenty of movies worth going to the cinema for recently. Up! and A Serious Man being two I saw last year that were worth 20x the price of one Avatar ticket!
But your point is good. Most movies suck because most movie viewers suck and will be lining up en masse for Yogi Bear.
The Doom movie was shockingly non-crappy... (Score:2)
...and it even featured Dwayne "the really sucky actor" Johnson; a sure sign of bad plots.
No, and fuck you (Score:3)
Video games don't need movie adaptations. We've progressed past that point. Hollywood can suck it.
Two Sides of the Same Coin (Score:2)
Braindead Hollywood (Score:2)
from TFA:
However, judging from the synopsis currently on IMDB, the story looks set to take place during the First Contact War – events that transpire prior to those of the game itself. Fans of the series will know that this is an integral part of Mass Effect mythology, but once again, this has me pounding my head into my desk. Mythologically significant or not, The First Contact War has no direct connection to the events of the game. Once again, Hollywood seems to think it knows better. With a trilogy outline so clearly established in the first game, and with Hollywood apparently envisaging Mass Effect as a movie trilogy, this change to telling a story that pre-dates the first game’s storyline is completely nonsensical.
Once more proving that Hollywood executives, in thinking that they know better than celebrated videogame creators and millions of die-hard fans, apply their reverse-Midas touch to yet another solid gold idea to turn it into worthless, poisonous lead.
Comparisons (Score:2)
Wha? Did you really compare a recent pop-culture video game to a book series that's enjoyed over 150 million copies sold over the last 56 years? I personally feel that it probably does deserve better than its likely to get, but saying that its an epic structure worthy of the same respect that one of the seminal works of modern fiction received is just plain sil
Inverse is true (Score:2)
Games made after movies are even worse than movies made after games!
Anyone else notice the inverse is true as well?
Ultimate Video Game Plot: Bad Dudes (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What is the point (Score:5, Interesting)
In my mind respect is only one part of the equation worth exploring. Understanding of the game becomes another. Mass Effect may have been about shooting Geth, driving the Mako and using biotics but there was an underlying theme of good versus evil within the character. Perhaps not even versus, both Paragon and Renegade are a part of Shepard, problem is you can't introduce choice into a film and therefore can't communicate it as well as you can in a game. Another issue is whether you have Shepard as a man or a woman. Jennifer Hale was by far the better voice actor and I would find a real female lead a far more interesting story than another bland bloke. The fact that she was a woman wasn't exploited for sexual purposes in ME, it just so happened she was a woman. But you know that wouldn't be how hollywood would do it.
The article says that judging by the IMDB page, its set during the first contact war, so they wouldn't be having to ruin everyones Shepard on them if they did make the film.
Incidently the website linked to was down for me so here is a link to a google cache of it [googleusercontent.com]
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Ah, good versus evil, how profound. Did they by any chance choose the motif of broken mirrors to show the protagonist's fragmented self?
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I'm pretty sure I've read a choose-your-own-adventure Goosebumps that explored similar territory.
Re:What is the point (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure I've read a choose-your-own-adventure Goosebumps that explored similar territory.
Right. It's a similar literary mechanic, but for grown ups.
As a kid I remember having an Indiana Jones choose your own adventure. The difference is that with Indy I had to choose whether to flee from the Nazis out the front door or climb the window to the roof. In Mass Effect you make choices like whether or not to commit genocide to suit humanities war effort, or support a close friend's choice to murder someone. It's a little different.
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In Mass Effect you make choices like whether or not to commit genocide to suit humanities war effort, or support a close friend's choice to murder someone. It's a little different.
And that difference is? In both cases you get to make artificial choices forced on you by the game designer; you don't get to make arbitrary choices like you do in real life, and none of them really matter.
BTW, I remember even Dr Who having to decide whether or not to commit genocide to eliminate the Daleks in the 1970s, _on a kids' SF show_. So claiming this is somehow 'adult' seems pretty funny.
Gaming went seriously downhill once designers decided 'oh, we've got to have a _story_'. That meant forcing the
At the risk of repeating myself (Score:3)
At the risk of repeating myself, it's stupid to try to argue something down just based on an over-simplified summary of a trope.
Yes, believe it or not, there's only a handful of tropes [tvtropes.org] around. You can find the same tropes in kids shows, or in elaborate alegories for adults. Until someone invents a new trope, yes, of course, you'll find examples of each in both lightweight kids' stuff and in profound stuff and anything in between.
Dismissing something just because some trope was also done in a kid's show, wit
If you reduce it to a strawman... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you reduce it to an oversimplified strawman, of course nothing is profound. The Odyssey is just about some guy dicking around the sea instead of going home. LORD of the ring is a old-timey==good vs industrialism-and-change==bad story. War And Peace is about war and identity crisis. Crime And Punishment is just about the simple moral dilemma of whether you can justify evil means for a good purpose, so basically good vs evil again. (Since you already reduced similar themes in ME2 to just simple good vs evil, or to seeing the same basic trope in a choose-your-adventure book.) Etc. Not very profound when put that way, is it?
In fact, I your message was trolling, because otherwise it's so stupid it's depressing. What makes something profound or not isn't just having theme X or theme Y in it, but you do with it and what you explore from there. You can take any theme in the world and turn it into a shallow exercise, or do something thought-provoking with. You just need to look at the likes of Lewis Caroll who managed to turn something as dry as hating the new mathematics and especially topology, into a classic, or L. Frank Baum who took a political alegory so far that most people don't even figure it out and again managed to turn it into something both popular and for many people thought-provoking.
So, really, troll or just stupid?
So? :P (Score:2)
I'm not sure I need an extra category there, though. The kind of hipster who praises X just because it's "in" and dismisses Y with some hare-brained excuse just because it's not on the list of hip things he should like, falls quite neatly under "stupid" in my system.
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Because right or wrong, there are a large amount of people who wont play a computer game because its too "nerd like"
What? Where have you been for the past four years [wikipedia.org]? I even hear there's plenty of girls who play WoW. Of course WoW and Wii games are designed to cater for noobs, but it's still plenty of people playing computer games. Gaming is very mainstream these days.
The only game->movie film I really thought was anywhere near good was Tomb Raider (the first one, the second was "meh"). Though perhaps the fact I only ever played the demos helped with that (didn't really like the game).
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Come on, the wii is casual gaming. Casual gaming is not the same as what would be considered "hardcore". No one is talking about making a film out of Wii Sports or Farmville or any of the other games which are well and truly casual gaming. We're talking about Mass Effect, we're talking about Resident Evil, we're talking about House of Dead we're talking about the other million and one games which a majority of people in the world simply will not play.
Arguably a Zelda movie or a Warcraft movie would have a target audience that is an order of magnitude larger than any of these... And first person shooters rarely translate well into movies - I didn't expect the Doom movie to be any good, but even Max Payne (which is an FPS that is as narrative-driven as they come) was pretty rubbish as a movie.
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Well, Max Payne was actually a TPS, but I agree with you. Gaming is not nerdy these days. There may be a distinction between "hardcore" and "casual" gaming, but that is simply down to how much time people have to play their games, their individual skill level, and their interests.
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Wha? I've not played Mass Effect or Resident Evil (well, I played a demo of RE1 ~14 years ago but I hated the controls and camera angles and any time I've seen someone playing the sequels I can't say it's got me any more interested), but I love the Resident Evil movies.
How does House of the Dead fit into your list? It's available to the public in the arcades - plenty of casual gamers will have played it, and the plot didn't seem special to me.
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Come on, the wii is casual gaming. Casual gaming is not the same as what would be considered "hardcore"
Its simpler than that. Its framing the question by careful selection of description to get the answer you want. It has little relationship with reality of course.
Real gaming, also known hardcore gaming, is just endless remakes of Wolfenstein3D from 1992. I thought it was fun for a couple years (decades?) but now its pretty boring. "I've got a good idea, lets fight WWII again, err, uh, I mean lets do it again in higher res"
Not real gaming, also known as "casual" or "for noobs" is merely the entire human experience of technologically aided recreation with the sole exclusion of first person shooters.
Re:What is the point (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because right or wrong, there are a large amount of people who wont play a computer game because its too "nerd like".
There are also those who refuse to shell out money for an entire console simply because it has a single game they want. There are also those unwilling to make the 30+ hour investment a game requires. There are also people (such as myself) who are unable to grasp the mechanics of modern gameplay and partake in such pleasures as Mass Effect (I struggle with combat that isn't turn based and/or menu driven).
But hey, don't let facts stop you from making a martyr of yourself simply because you play video games.
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Your third point I accept, there maybe those who simply can't play computer game
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Because right or wrong, there are a large amount of people who wont play a computer game because its too "nerd like". This is when marketing execs see golden opportunity. Not only will you get most of the fans of the game to see it at least once, you'll probably get the people who wouldn't have touched a game with a barge poll.
Why would people who don't care about the game be interested in a movie adaptation of that game? Game movies are every bit as nerdy as the games themselves. Possibly even more so; The Sims and Farmville aren't terribly nerdy as far as I can tell, but simply make The Sims: The Movie or Farmville: The Movie, and all of a sudden it's nerdy.
Movies are a different medium than games. A story doesn't translate well from an active, participatory medium like games to a passive consumption medium like movies. And if
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Because right or wrong, there are a large amount of people who wont play a computer game because its too "nerd like".
I think a large number of people think some nerd games are nerd like, but think games in general are fun. Some more well adjusted members of society understand that LARPing and playing Quidditch are just a bit too, well, nerdy for most people.
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I think there are two reasons. One, they see a cash cow; fans of the game are going to see the movie no matter how bad it is, and with a few exceptions there aren't many games with a serious plot. "Chess -- The Motion Picture!"
That said, you could take DOOM and make a great thriller out of it.
What I can't understand is why so many games that are based on movies suck so badly.
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I think it's great and I firmly believe the next step is turning architecture into cinematic classics. Who needs original content?
(Come to think of it, Helvetica the movie was quite excellent. I can't wait for the adaptation of Comic Sans, let's hire Uwe Boll for that.)
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moreover, people only care if it's a good adaptation.
there have been plenty of horrible ones. House of the dead anyone?
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What's the point of making a video game into a movie? You already have the story, the actors, the dialog, the setpieces, etc.
Apart from the actors, so does a book. The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Harry potter movies show that you can make half decent movies when you already have story, dialogue etc. in place; it's just another medium for telling the same story*, some people like video games, others like movies, others prefer books. Many like a mix - I don't like FPS games, but if they released a good movie of one, I'd watch it happily.
*The Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy was released for radio, TV, as books, as a comput
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