Archives

So we’ve now seen the launch of the PS3 and the Nintendo Wii (worst name evar…) and the good old 360. And me? I got nothing.

I was going to go out and do some coverage of the local game launches, but none of the local stores did any midnight sales or even seemed to have people camping out and waiting in line. So no coverage for you!

Personally, I bought Half-Life 2 for X-Box for $9.99 just to see how it compared to the XP version. It looks the same, but the controls blow. The right stick is used to aiming and if you click it, you zoom in, but you can’t shoot. Therefore, inevitably, whenever I get into a tense fight, I inadvertently click the stick, zoom in, can’t shoot, and die. The D-Pad is used to switch the weapons. In a fairly clever approximation of the PC version’s menus where multiple weapons would be under each number, the X-Box D-pad has four categories with multiple weapons under each one and pressing in the same direction multiple times will cycle through the weapons in that category. The problem is, however, to switch you have to take your thumb off the left stick which is used to control the direction you are going. So when you switch weapons, you have to stop moving, which is frustrating. I’ve started to stretch my right thumb over to the D-pad to switch.

I’ve played Halo, I’ve played Goldeneye, and now I’ve played Half-Life 2 — all on consoles. And guess what? They all sucked. So is the appeal of games like Goldeneye and Halo simply people that have never played FPS games on a PC? Or is there something I’m actually not getting about these games? On some level, I suppose it is similar to EA who keeps releasing Madden for PCs. Who buys those? If you are going to play Madden, buy a console. If you are going to play a FPS buy or build a gaming computer.

The journal The Velvet LIght Trap recently released a call for papers for a special issue about remakes. That got me thinking about the recent trend of making videogames based on old movies. Just this year games based on, The Godfather, The Warriors, Jaws, and Scarface have been released — and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

What are these games? Since the call for papers asked for papers about remakes, the question that popped to my head was, “Are these remakes?” In some cases, they are sequels. In other cases they are side stories. Can a story taken from one medium and made in another even be a remake — that is to say, are adaptations different things than remakes? Must a remake be in the same medium as the original? Is a film of Romeo and Juliet a remake?

I’m not sure. Any thoughts?

With appologies to Judith Butler, it seems that there is some genre trouble going on in the videogame world. The October issue of Edge magazine has a short column about the fact that there are a million Grand Theft Auto III clones coming out and “GTA Clone” isn’t exactly the best name for it. I’ll go ahead and commit copyright infringement by posting the fill text of it here since it doesn’t seem to be online (Insert here a rant about how expensive Edge magazine is in the USA and how they need an electronic version because I’m poor.):

Just Cause, Scarface, Crackdown, Dead Rising, Yakuza, Saints Row, Gangs Of London – oh, and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories. And that’s just in this month’s issue: there’s no question a genre has just come of age. Pity we still have no idea what to call it.
The ‘GTA-clone’ – not that it was ever an elegant phrase – just won’t cut it any more, not in the face of the extraordinary diversity listed above. And surely no one’s seriously suggesting that we wrap our tongues around ‘the free-roaming action adventure’ from here on in. Or we could take a tip from the Germans: if for them platform games are ‘run-and-jumps’, perhaps we could have the ‘drive-and-shoot’? Perhaps not.
But that last idea raises another problem. Possibly held back by the fact that we still don’t have a name for it, it’s still not really been agreed what the key components of the genre actually are. It needs to take place in a freely accessible world, but does that space need to be physically contiguous? It didn’t seem to need to be in Grand-Theft-Auto-meets-Mars-Attacks Destroy All Humans. Does it have to include combat? Surely yes, but its absence didn’t stop Grand-Theft-Auto-meets-The-Simpsons Hit’n’Run being widely claimed a clone. Does it even have to be driving and fighting?
There’s no question Dead Rising feels a little like it belongs, and yet it doesn’t really meet that requirement. Perhaps, appropriately, the only way to judge them is like suspected alcoholics. If a game can tick three of the following boxes, then it qualifies: freely accessible play area, story missions and side missions, hidden packages and/or detailed stats, a civilian population to torment, some form of combat, some form of driving. Does that about cover it?
Of course, genres have always been problematic, and they’ve always had awkward names, but perhaps the GTA-a-like issue is so acute because it’s the first true second-generation genre. The familiar roster (driving, shooting, platforming, strategy) are all built around the idea of a game focused on one type of interaction. But what we’re talking about is a genre built out of those genres: a genetic inheritance. It’s just unfortunate that it’s a child that seems to be forever stuck with a double-barelled surname.

I’ve talked about genre before, as far back as my review of Medium of the Video Game. And I recently made a post about it on a Slashdot story asking about A Definitive List of Gaming Genres. I wrote

Genres are only useful for movie stores… Ok, so that may be an exaggeration, but I think the point remains valid: there isn’t much point in coming up with genres.

Mark J. P. Wolf in Medium of the Video Game list a bunch of genres that are fairly useless such as listing demos as their own genre.

While I’m not a fan of applying film theory to videogames, I think that Rick Altman in Film/Genre makes the most interesting use of genre by syntax and semantics. (Actually, there isn’t a lot of need to read the entire book. He lays out syntax and semantics as a way of looking at genre in his article, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre” which is widely reprinted and is included as an index in the Film/Genre book).

Regarding the GTA-Clones, besides the obvious title of GTA-Clone, the phrase I seem to hear most is some variation on “urban action.” Which of course has problems of its own since there isn’t any reason why a GTA-Clone would have to be “urban” in nature.
In films, and other media, genres aren’t born fully formed like Athena leaping from the head of Zeus. They develope over time. We may think of The Great Train Robbery as the first Western, but it wasn’t instantly called that. Other films had to imitate it and take elements from it untill enough film were made that people could look back and retroactively determine what a “Western” was. The same thing will have to happen with GTA-Clones. In a few years, we will be able to look back and make up a name for them that is more descriptive than “GTA-Clone.”

With the mid-term elections coming up, local television has been inundated with political ads. One of the local candidtates, Mike Sodrel and his political party have been running ads against Baron Hill (Of course Baron Hill’s people have been running negative ads as well. They just aren’t as noteworthy.). The funny thing is, these ads seem like they are actually asking me to vote for Hill and not against him. In the first one, Sodrel says that Hill voted against “protecting traditonal marriage” (how banning gay marriage protects marriage is beyond me) and voted against “protecting our flag” (which would be ever so effective…). Who knew those were bad things? And not, the latestest ads bring out the big guns: videogames!

Nice to know that in Indiana the biggest issues are videogames. Good thing there isn’t a war going on or anything…
What will the next ad be? Baron Hill supports blogger? Baron Hill supports left-handed people? I for one can’t wait!