Several months ago I was home at my parent's home and on Showtime Beyond and I caught the end of a weird kung fu movie with some videogame elements. Curious I bought the dvd. Now, after sitting on my pile of films to watch I have finally watched that dvd. That movie is the French produced Samouraïs (i'm trying some fancy and yet shameless Amazon affiliate link thingy here. If you click on there and buy it I"ll get 8¢!).
Basically, like most French produced kung fu movies, of which this is the only one I'm aware, it is pretty weird. The reviews are not kind. Basically, there is a demon who was brought to Earth 500 years ago, which gives us a chance for some samurai action -- hense the title -- and then we go to the present day where the demon is going to be reborn into the ancestor of the person that brought the demon to Earth in the first place. That woman happens to be in France where she runs into our generic hero and his highly irritating sidekick. I'm sure that said sidekick will soo bee sued by Dustin Diamond for stealing his Screech character and demeaning it of all self-respect.
The videogame part comes in when the generic hero's little brother plays a game based on the demon and takes control of the generic hero so that he can beat the demon. The game looks like original PlayStation-era graphics but, for once, videogames aren't shown as evil or negative. In fact they are the only way that the demon is beaten.
Without the videogame content, the film is very forgettable. With it, it is only interesting as a footnote. I give it three thumbs up.
And now, my trademarked review haiku:
Samouraïs is bad
and it made me want to screech
poor Dustin Diamond
LIke lots of people, I've recently played the Prey demo. Coincidentally, just a couple days before the Prey demo came out, I also started playing Shadow Warrior. While Shadow Warrior came out in the late 90s and Prey hasn't came out yet (although it has quite a long history and was originally conceived around the same time as Shadow Warrior), there are a lot of interesting similarities besides the obvious fact that they were both spearheaded by 3D Realms (although Prey was produced by Human Head, it was 3D Realms that originated the project).
While going from the venerable Build Engine to the currently state-of-the-art Doom 3 Engine was quite a jolt, and Prey's portals and gravity-flipping were quite fun, beyond the visuals, the other details haven't changed that much. Shadow Warrior is over-the-top and full of intentionally stereotypical depictions of Asians. To give an indication of the humor included in the game, the main character's name is Lo Wang and like his spiritual predecessor, Duke Nukem, he has lots of witty phrases. On some level it is pretty offensive, and mixes Japanese elements such as ninjas with Chinese elements, but it is so over the top and cartoony it is hard to get worked up about it. I mean it's no Showdown in LIttle Tokyo or anything.
Prey stars a Cherokee man by the name of Tommy Hawk, which, not as bad as Lo Wang, is still a lame pun, who gets sucked up into a UFO along with his grandfather and girlfriend (who spends the whole demo screaming "Help me! Help me!" in a way that would make Princess Peach embarrassed. Although the elements in the demo try to play the Cherokee heritage straight and respectfully, they end up with something that has a lot more in common with Shadow Warrior's level of accuracy than it has different from it. Metafuture has already covered it in their article, "Your Guide To The Cherokee People" so the only thing I will add is this: When Tommy dies he goes to his ancestral homeland. Who knew that The US South was a dessert full of buttes?
Call me a sucker, or call me hardcore. I've bought both SiN Episodes: Emergence (which I found pretty sinful) and Half-Life 2: Episode One (which doesn't make any sense, does it? If this is episode one of half-life 2, then what was half-life 2?)
Half-Life's episodic content was a lot more polished (not Polish) than Sin's. You have to hand it to Valve, their games are allways extremely well thought out. I've played through episode one one on normal and I'm playing through it again with the commentary track. The commentary track really illistrates how much thought they put into it and is a nice feature.
The main question, however, is, "Is it worth $20?" The answer? "I'm not sure."
On one hand, you have the marketing hype: "Episodic content let's the game makers release games more quickly." While I'm sure that is true, I can't help but be troubled by the other hand, the economic reality: "It let's the game makers suck consumers dry." I'm glad I bought the first episodes of each game. Nothing ventured, nothing gained and all that crap. However, I don't think I will buy Sin episode 2. I'm not sure about Half-Life 2 Episode 2.
The fact of that matter is that this episodic content is right up there with subscription model sofware for ripping off customers. Countless others have done the math: 3 episodes =$60. I don't know when the last time I paid more than $30 for a games! --OK, atually, I do. It was when Half-Life 2 came out...
Another aspect of episodic delivery is the fact that customers will expect better and better graphics as time goes one. Sin is talking about 9 episodes or something. I doubt that gamers will be happy if episode 9 visually has the same look as episode 1. This presents some interesting challenges. It will be an odd situation where the first part of a storyline looks worse than the last part. Moreover, there is the fact that gamers will expect a new graphics advances in every episode. So what happens if the company develop two or more advances? Will they withhold one of the upgrades untill the next episode -- risking fans finding out and being further pissed off?
There is also the question of continuing the revenue stream. As the comic book world knows, first issues sell better than second issues and every issue after that generally sells less and less. This isn't the case for games. In many cases, the sequel will sell better than the original. However, by removing the one, two, or more year wait between gameplay experiences, Valve is certainly moving into the realm of comic books and other monthly entertainments. So how will they get someone to buy episode four if they didn't buy episode three? With Valve's habit of endlessly repackaging the original Half-Life, I wouldn't be suprised if they didn't offer package deals where you could get several old episodes at a discount -- which makes me want to skip the rest of the episodes so I can get them for cheap.
Oh well, only time will tell if these questions get answered or if I cave in and buy episode two when it comes out...
Whle I said that I didn't like Silent Hill, I have to join everyone else and say that Alone in the Dark is horrible. And not in a good way.
A couple months ago I was at the video store and saw Alone in the Dark sitting on the shelf and decided to rent it without looking at the back of the box. I get it home and pop it in and it turns out that it isn't Uwe Boll's film, but rather 1982's Alone in the Dark. Let me tell you, the 82 film with the same title is a million times better than the 2005 version.
As I'm writing this I'm listening to Boll's commentary and he keeps saying things that make me want to slap him.
First of all, he keeps explaining all the characters' motivations. Call me crazy, but perhaps it would have been better to, you know, actually have that in the film or something.
Second, he keeps stating what is going on. "And then he goes over to her and then talk..." I suppose that blind people appreciate that, but the rest of us are watching the film, Uwe. We don't need you to describe it for us.
Third, he keeps bragging about all the product placements he got for the films. He has no shame!
Fourth, he actually admitted that he gets to make movies because of German tax shelters. (OK, that's actually pretty funny. He comes this close to actually admitting that he's only in it to make money. Too bad for Boll that Germany has changed their tax laws)
Fifth, he blames videogame companies and fans for the film's failure. He talks about how he doesn't understand why the owners of Alone in the dark wouldn't release an Alone in the Dark game when the film came out and says that it would have helped the film. He also says that videogame fans are too picky.
Sixth, he calls other horror films that have came out recently cootie-cutter and all the same and is mad because he doesn't understand why people didn't go see his super original film. He says it isn't straight horror, or straight action, or whatever.
And that's the problem with the film. Not only is it not just a single genre, but it is actually several of them put together. Now I said that Silent Hill was like Super Smash Brothers in that it mixed up elements from a bunch of other films. Well, Alone in the Dark does that too, but where Silent Hill uses the differnt elements like paint and mixes them together to create something that at lest hangs together, Alone in the Dark just smashes them together. The result is less like a painting made up of a bunch of different colors, but more like a kid trying to build something with a bunch of different colored legos. Sure you can put red, blue, green, white, and yellow legos together to make something, but you can still see all the individual elements because they don't go together in any coherent way.
THe film throws todether pseudo-archeological adventure with zombies, with one random fight scene whose setting is an ice factory straight out of Bruce Lee's Fists of Fury (yes, it even takes place in a random Chinatown location for some reason!), with Starship Troopers complete with soldiers in black outfits and helmets and House of the Dead's Ona Grauer with redish hair that makes her look like Dina Meyer of Starship Troopers, the end of Resident Evil (or a million other movies, for that matter)and finally fancy light bullets from such films as Blade and Underworld. (Oh crap, he just mentioned Body Snatchers and he said that the people who have these slug-like things in them were puppets!! He has no shame! And he just called the creatures Xenomorphs)
It does have a nice 80's era Scorpions-esque euro-hair-metal theme though. It's very European.
Anyway, if you are going to see a film called Alone in the Dark, go see the one starring Jack Palance and Martin Landau. It has a great twist towards the end.
Alone in the Dark
Uwe Boll does not have shame
Watch the other one.
I saw the Doom movie this afternoon and I have to give it seven thumbs up. Lots of shooting and very little plot -- just the way I like it. It was the best movie I've seen today and the best videogame movie ever. The only flaw was that they had Eomer beat the Rock. Yeah, as if!
From a scholarly point of view, the most interesting thing about the film was the closing credits. For the unfortunate few who have not yet seen the film yet, during the first part of the end credits they show a FPS-style clip where a gun runs around shooting the credits. What made it so interesting was that the graphics of the clip were of very low quality. It was some sort of psuedo-wireframe animation that almost looked like the Doom 3 game without the textures. I found it very interesting that in order to have the end credits "look like a game" they had to make the graphics look significantly worse than the graphics of the actual game. Presumably, if they had just done some sort of machinima with the Doom 3 engine, it wouldn't have had the "look" they wanted. The graphics of the game seemingly didn't match the conception of what the filmmakers thought a game should look like.
Another feature of the film of interest (but of less interest to me since I heard about it going in) was the first-person sequence. It was a neat gimmic, but I kept wondering of the logic of it. Why were we seeing things form his point of view? Why did we stop seeing things from that perspective? There also seemed to be a couple times when there seemed to be cuts in the shot, so that it wasn't all in one take, which distracted from the gimmic for me.
Anyway, the film is plain mindless fun. You do like things that are fun, don't you?
Last night G4 aired the first episode of Video Game Vixens. Yes, it is exactly what it sounds like. I tried to make it to the first commercial break, I really did. However, it was just too lame for me, the prude that I am...
However, the first five or so minutes were more than enough for me. The show is hosted by Hal Sparks. I supposed this is the biggest celebrity that G4 has ever had on a show. To make the show kewl, he is introduced by a DJ. But then again, so is Ellen DeGeneres and while I like Ellen and her show isn't horrible, cool isn't one of the words I would use to describe her. Nor is it one of the words I would use to describe the Video Game Vixens. The "Videogame Vixen Judges" are an "eclectic" group to put it politely. Even though she was sitting in the middle and not on the end the first person they introduced was "WWE Rookie Diva of 2005," Joy Giovanni. It is odd that even though I am a fan of professional wrestling, I didn't recognize her. The second judge was game writer Seanbaby who does a pretty funny column for EGM. The last judge was some guy from MTV's Road Rules. I guess now we know what happens to former reality show participants.
Interestingly, even though the show is Video Game Vixens, according to the website, the judges are "Videogame Vixen Judges" which means that rather than take a side in the "videogame" vs. "video game" debate the show just uses both versions of the word. That's on purpose, I'm sure and not the result of shoddy production values.
Then they started showing clips of videogame characters and I decided to go and actually play a game.
The show did get off to an interesting start, though. They did a sketch of a beauty contest and then Laura Croft, Bloodrayne and some other woman came in and kicked ass. Since they were portrayed by living breathing women, it was kind of interesting. However, I suppose that the fact that the highlight of the show was the opening is faint praise.
Lest anyone think I'm judging the whole show on just watching the first 5 or so minutes, I did record it and plan on watching the whole thing sometime this week. If there is something more of merit to Video Game Vixens, I will post a retraction.
Commence holding breath...
Last weekend, I wrote about a gamer documentary I ran across. I hadn't seen it then, but now that I have seen Gamer Br, I can recommend it to those interested in the Brazilian gaming scene. The film is mostly in Portuguese but there are English subtitles. Mainly covering the computer gaming scene, the film highlights some of the legal issues that gamers are facing as well as talking to some of the gamers. Overall, it is fairly similar to the Modern Day Gamer film and its sequel, but Gamer Br does offer insight into the gaming culture of Brazil and also gets credit for talking to some of the government officials who are responsible for making the policy decisions regarding videogames. If you have the bandwidth, it is certainly worth your time to download the film.
I went to the Game On exhibit in Chicago last Monday and I give it thumbs up. I had heard that they used emulators, but almost all the machines there actually were on original hardware. They did have one MAME machine connected to a big screen but the rest were actual arcade machines and consoles. I finally got to play an Atari Jaguar and have to agree that it does have a very odd controller. It seems like it your fingers should go up in the front but it doesn't have trigger or shoulder buttons.
There were some omissions, of course. Computer games were under-represented. There was no Doom, or Quake or even Ultima or Diablo. There was, however, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Other omission were online games of all kinds and fighting games (there was a copy of one of the street fighters). In fact, the only FPS game was Metroid Prime which people claim isn't really a FPS at all.
Despite these holes, the exhibit was rather complete with everything from Space Invaders to DDR, from Donkey Kong to Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. We spend three hours in there playing games. All in all, it was worth the trip. Check it out if you can!
In between playing Thief 3, I got a couple books in the mail the other day and I've started reading Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar and The Making of Doom 3. Both books are visually amazing, but they are interesting in comparison to each other. The Doom 3 book is full of suitably scary and gothy fonts and layout, while the Half-Life 2 book is more slick and streamlined. The Doom 3 paperback, Half-Life 2 hardback. It is obvious that they meant the Half-Life 2 book to be more of a coffetable book. So far the Half-Life book is much more informative than the Doom one, at least in terms of background info. The Doom book is much more concerned with the technical things, while the Half-Life one is a more historical book.
The biggest thing though is that the Doom book has an author, Steven Kent, while the Half-Life book is simply "by Valve." Who knew that beside making games, the folks at Valve wrote books? Seriously though, while the book is full of lots of quotes, almost like a commentary track on a DVD, there still had to be someone who sat down and interviewed these people and put all this into some shape. Since I tend to spend a lot of time interviewing people and putting those interviews into some sort of order, I'd like to see the person who did that get some sort of credit besides contributing editor or manager. It is interesting that a company like Valve that has had issues with people stealing their work, would put out a book without attributing it to someone. There's all kinds of theft in the world. Just because some of it is legal doesn't mean it is any more right...
On another note this is my 101st post on movable type (ok, sure there might have been a couple test posts in there, but still!) Of course before I used movable type, I had a site on geocities that I put up sometime back in 2001, and then started using blogger in April of 2002. I finally moved to my own dot com site in January of 2004 where I will be for a long time to come. 101 posts in a little over a year, not so bad, if I do say so myself. Thanks for reading!
It is my birthday! I'm 31. Weeeeeeeeee!!!
Haven't been playing many games lately. Been busy with the school starting again. Watched Video Game Revolution on PBS last night. Nothing that other documentaries haven't gone over a million times before, but entertaining at least. Of course, we saw all the usual suspects interviewed: Steven Kent, Nolan Bushnell, Henry Jenkins and the like. So I guess since this is at least the 3rd Videogame history that has appeared in the past 5 years, we can see the canonization of videogame history being built. Atari, but they stole it from Baer, then they sold it to Warner brothers, then Nintendo came along, then there was Doom and some kids killed people and Grand Theft Auto is a great game but morally questionable (note: that is the ideology of these programs, not me. I have a hard time taking seriously claims from people who haven't played the game, because every time i try to go on a killing spree in GTA3 the cops are on me in a heartbeat). While they did talk about violence a bit, at least our good friends Dave Grossman and Jack Thompson weren't mentioned (and thankfully, neither was Robert Thompson) nor was there any talk of rape in Grand Theft Auto. However, there was a lot of minor errors, or deceits. Showing Vice City while talking about GTA3 and showing Super Nintendo games while still talking about the NES.
The most interesting thing about these docs though, is that they make it seem like the US is the main contributor to gaming. Even when they mention Japan, they don't really mention the impact of Japanease games. And Europe and other parts of the world? Unless you are talking about Tetris, forget about it. I'm interested in getting some more of an international perspective. Besides the interesting Game Over is there anything about the history of videogames that isn't explicitly about America?
Since the weather here is frightful, I thought I would give a little update on my reading material.
I finished Dungeons & Dreamers recently and found it to be interesting and entertaining, if a bit scattered in its focus. Like Masters of Doom, it is a non-academic historical look at gaming, with particular interest paid to RPG's specifically the role that Dungeons and Dragons and the Ultima series had in the development of videogaming.
I might write up a formal review for Reconstruction, the web journal that published me last review, so I won't go into too much detail here. Let me just say that I found the first half that focused on Garriot to be very interesting and once it moved away from him I found it to be rather fragmented in focus and not nearly as personal or as interesting. It is a good light read and fun. I think I would recommend Masters of Doom over it. However, that may be simply due to my stronger interest in FPS games than RPGs.
I purchased Gamers: A Documentary back before Thanksgiving. I usually review books as soon as I finish reading them. For some reason it didn't occur to me to review this documentary untill just before Christmas.
I submitted it to an online journal some fellow Bowling Green alums are running called Reconstruction. The review is now up.
So head over to Reconstruction and read my review. You might as well read the whole site as well. They're smart kids doing interesting work. Rock on.
I was getting ready to sit down and write my review for The Video Game Theory Reader and I thought I'd look around and see what others have said about it. I ran across a message board with some interesting reviews of some of the articles over at Matt Barton's site.
As for my own thoughts on the book, let me just say that it is an interesting book. A bit too film based for my tastes. Like any anthogy, a couple articles rock, a few are just average and the rest are just lame. There are a couple more lame articles than I would like, but overall it is worth reading.
more coming...
