Video Game Movies

One of the best things I find about games is their ability to suck in the player and engage them in a fictional setting like no other. Interactive fiction is an incredible new addition to that most ancient of magical of human art of story telling. So why is it time and time again the fantastic opportunities presented with the incredibly rich and imaginative settings of computer game universes are squandered. It has to be agreed that the majority of video game movies suck balls. Every time the licenses are handed over to people who produce cheesy, childish movies that have no place in any gamers movie library over the age of 14. Convoluted plots, ridiculous attempts to portray gameplay in live action (Doom), awful casting (Doom), cringy dialog (oh, I know, Doom) and an tendency to miss capturing the es sense of the game.

Get your tongue out of my arsehole Koopa..

Clearly much of the green lights behind most of these films is driven by the want to capitalise on a games success. Movies such as Mario Brothers, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat try hard to cling to concepts conceived to be played on an 8 Bit machine. The poorly conceived plots struggle to make any sense and seemed to be more concerned with including all of the games characters, unconcerned with how flat and ill conceived they were (Mortal Kombat Annihilation is the worst offender). I would not have been surprised to have seen a tofu character in the Resident Evil films. So far, the majority of movies based on beat 'em up games like street fighter were clearly a shameless attempt to cash in on the success of the games. The most despicable example of this is following the 1994 release of Street Fighter came the unimaginatively titled; 'Street Fighter The Move The Game'. Seriously. Capcom went too far on this one. It is an awful shame the great Raul Julia's final time on screen was this shambolic effort.

Oh Look, its Mario Mario...You asshole

I feel I must also elaborate some more on the Mario Brothers movie. Apart from being based on a game where realism and believable characters were the last thing on Shigeru Miyamoto's mind, the fact that such a film could even be made boggles the mind. I mean how could they even attempt such a thing? One of the most infamous moments is where we finally find out what Mario & Luigi's second names are.. Mario. Yes that's right, so Mario Mario and Luigi Mario.. for fuck sake that is below contempt. Trying to have a serious plot about such a game missed the whole point of the original and why it was so awesome. Both Bob Hoskins and the late Dennis Hopper agreed it was the worst project they had ever worked on and I have no sympathy for either of them.

Yeah thanks Uwe..

Another menace to the video game world is the German director Uwe Boll. This person is responsible for the some of the worst films of all time, including Alone in the Dark, Blood Rayne and House of the Dead. ALone in the Dark and House of the Dead are notoriously bad films. Terrible editing, uninspired acting are the hall marks of his films. It seems that he really doesnt think much of gamers as he continually tries to force feed us his uninspired crap. Alone in the Dark is an epic fail. The film begins with a 5 minute text intro where the writing is hard to read and story difficult to follow. From this point on you know this is going to be painful. Tara Reid was cast as a scientist character in Alone in the Dark. How do we know she is a scientist? Her smart dialog, convincing portrayal of as an intellectual maybe? No, because shes wearing glasses of course. Other moments include people who were killed then getting up too early before the camera had moved passed them and the scene making it into the final edit of the movie.. Concentrate Uwe.. He is also well know for challenging his critics to boxing matches and beating the living man shit out of them. While this may be an admirable trait, his efforts have destroyed public confidence in video game movies. Its hard to find people who would even consider video game films seriously and frankly I have nothing to say to them as it is mostly true.

Look out puny critic

However there are very rare example of good films. Unfortunately, they are usually either very short, obscure and never fully or properly realised. One of my favourite games is Dead Space. This atmospheric survival horror has great plot and interesting setting. A little known but rather good animated film is Deadspace: Downfall. The film is a prequel to the game and describes the intial infection aboard the Ishimura. Its dark violent and atmospheric. However, as an animated film, it is unlikely to be seen by most people and so a rather good video game adaptation is likely to disappear into obscurity. The absolutely excellent short film, 'Escape from City 17' set during the events of Half Life 2: Episode One, is how I feel most video game films should be done. Admittedly it would be impossible to make a film as serious and realisitic as this about the likes of Mario, but that's the whole point. That mess should never have been made in the first place. Another teaser is the short trailer of a remake of Mortal Kombat released by Kevin Tancharoen. While this could again fall on its face, it was nice to see an effort that took the subject matter a bit more seriously, with the added bonus of 7of 9 as Sonia Blade!

Deadspace saves the day once again

Thankfully, there are many games that have escaped the attention of the profit hungry execs. Mass Effect, Bioshock, Assassins Creed are a few of the good games that have so far survived with their dignity intact. However it is only a matter of time before their growing success is noticed by the cash hungry executives who need that new yacht and another storey on their house. We can only pray that if such projects are ever pursued, the producers will show the level of respect and reverence they deserve.

Half Life 2 Movie

Despite the amature production values, this short film has mananged to surpass most other big budget game movies out so far.

 Enjoy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1UPMEmCqZo

Resident Evil

Ah Resident Evil, a series of games close to my corrupted heart. While I must admit I have not played any in many moons, they are still games that hold dear. I also have to admit that I have not played all of the games, the titles I have owned including the original on PS and DS, RE2 and then Code Veronica. Now I know I have not experienced many of the newer games, so I will keep this article about the ones I have.

Resident Evil is one of the best known video game franchises. Developed by Capcom, the Osaka based company behind other iconic gaming moments such as Street Fighter and Mega Man. RE's huge popularity is due to many reasons, mainly its scary atmosphere, well developed plots, excellent and innovative gameplay, great cinematics, exciting combat and a general love of the undead. In RE you usually play as a lone protagonist fighting their way through the recent apocalypse trying to stay alive and escape to some form of safety.

One of the first things to strike you about this game is its unusual name. RE has been in the collective psyche of gamers for nearly 15 years now, so most people don't stop to think about what a bizarre name for something this is. Resident. Evil. What the fuck does that even mean? I had heard a rumor that it was something to do with a direct translation from japanese, but I this sounded fairly dubious. Luckily, so dedicated am I to my new love of blogging, that I went to the trouble and researched the truth of the matter for this piece of material. As we all know, RE was to be called Biohazard (and still is in Japan), however, the guy in charge of marketing for Capcom in the US pointed out that it would be impossible to register that in America as it was already in use for a variety of IPs. So Capcom held a company wide competition to find a new name and the mysterious winner was a nameless developer who worked in their digital studios. So there you have it. Resident Evil is born. I wonder where that person is now....

In RE, the player must navigate through a series of locations, finding objects and clues that will enable them to progress through the game. You face many perils on your journey, including legions of undead, huge mutant monsters, treacherous team mates and malignant corporations. Combat is straight forward and fun, often requiring the player to sprint to safety as it can be easy for the inexperienced player to overwhelmed. The games puzzles have a steady difficulty curve and the player never really feels completely defeated by them. The gameworld is also richly detailed. There a big emphasis on exploring and the player can find lots of interesting information scattered throughout the games that build up the backstory. These can be very interesting and adds a lot of depth. Graphically, RE is a feast for the eyes. The pre-rendered backgrounds are very detailed and spooky, with the characters moving realistically and smoothly. The enemies look the part and there is lots of blood and violence to bask in.

Oh shit, did i disturb you??

The games most iconic baddies are the zombies. RE's particular flavour of zombies are dead humans who have been infected by a virus that can somehow reanimate their bodies and turn them into mindless shuffling monsters. The game came out in a time before the masses were introduced to the much more terrifying fast zombies (28 Days Later, Dawn of Dead etc) that are now so common in games. So in comparison with more modern games like Left4Dead, RE's zombies seem quite tame and its quite possible to simply walk around them as they dont pose much of a threat on their own. However, when RE came out, it was very scary. The zombies though slow, were tough and hard to kill and if the player wasnt careful, it was easy to get cornered. The atmosphere of these games is one of their strongest features. The music is creepy, the graphics were great and the cinematics were way ahead of anything else at the time. Who can forget that first zombie encounter where you interrupt one busily munching through the face of one of your missing comrades? Excellent stuff.

Despite all this greatness, there are a few points that have to be made. For a start, the voice acting is atrocious. Some of the dialog is mind numbingly awful and its almost as if some of the dialog was put in as a joke rather than as serious plot building elements. The RE has the dubious distinction of having one of the worst quotes from a video game as voted the IGN, "Jill, why don't you, the master of unlocking, take this lock pick." Yikes. Some of the characters are very cliched and unimaginative the overall story line of the games has numerous contradictions and continuity issues.

Hmmmmm

Another point is the main overall villain in the game, the Umbrella Corporation. Umbrella, hmm, not the most sinister inanimate object that could spring to mind. While this entity has all the usual hallmarks associated with big evil corporations, ie defence contractor, secret bioweapons research, control over the world economy and governments, something named after a rather useful and non threatening everyday object tends to suck much of the menace out of its presence. Names like Cyberdyne, Weyland-Yutani, Omni Corporation, Disney, LexCorp and EA all sound much more evil. The little umbrella logo is also something you would expect to see on a toilet seat, rather than a vial of a deadly zombification virus.

Duhhhhhhhh......

The movies also need a mention here. While not technically the game, the long curly turds that are the RE movies have in my opinion thrown a terrible shadow over the games franchise. Once again, another promising premise for a movie is ruined by putting the films creation in the shit covered hands of the producers behind the other aweful video game movies. The original RE movie was made by the asshole behind Mortal Kombat, the laughable Soldier and the other genre destroying shit storm Alien Vs Predator. So once again, we are subjected to cheesy, over the top crap that is an embarrassment to the franchise. Predictably, they fooled lots of interested gamers into watching them, thus generating lots of revenue for the execs and thus spawning several sequels all worse than the last. When will people learn...

I hate Tofu!

On the other hand, RE has some truly excellent moments. One of the best things I found about the different RE games Ive played is their high replayability. Being able to play as different characters whose stories intertwine with one another is great. Each characters game plays differently. The take different routes through the game and have many unique locations and items. In RE2 this is especially good with each character taking very different routes through the game with much more specific content. Depending on the speed and number of saves used in a game also gives the player different rankings when they complete the game. High rankings unlock cool extra features and game modes like unlocking different outfits or getting a Gatling gun with infinite ammo. There are also extra game modes where you play through a very tough section of the game as a heavily armed SWAT team member or as a large walking block of tofu. These extras make replaying the game much more appealing and interesting.

My personal favourites include the starting screen warning the player that this game 'contains scenes of extreme violence and gore'. Nuff said. Also, in the first game, the famous 'Keepers Diary' describe one persons personal experience as they slowly change into a zombie. If anyone has not read these I urge you to google it. The games spectacular cinematics were a great reward to finishing the games.

RE has had a long existence and have been updated nicely over the years. While I havent personally played any past Code Veronica, they look fantastic and have thankfully evolved past zombies as their primary enemies, with the Los Ganados & Majini in the last two games a cool new take on the franchise. While, like many of my peers, I am starting to get a little bored with the zombie franchise, I will never forget these games due to their excellent blend of engaging gameplay, encompassing plots, creepy atmosphere and a high replay value.

I want to dedicate this review to an old friend who shared a passion for this game and spent many an afternoon in Limerick exploring Racoon city with me. Congrats dude.

Adobe Illustrator

Finally sat down with this beast to try to figure it out. I must admit my initial trials with this program led to endless frustration and a tendancy to jump back to photoshop that i love so much. But i feel now iv finally got my head around some major difficulties I had with it in the past (shout out to John for his excellent tutorial the other day) and threw together something i could have done in photoshop in about 15 minutes, this time taking a bit longer. Anyways, im glad i think i can now navigate my way around this most perplexing of programs to a reasonable degree. Now lets hope Gamemaker and all of Authoring Principles so far can be as easy...

Dungeon Keeper

Many games today, as interesting and exciting as they are, tend to recycle old concepts and ideas. Dungeon Keeper first came out back in 1997, developed by Peter Molyneux’s Bullfrog Productions. Its sequel, Dungeon Keeper 2, came out in 1999. The two games at the core are very similar, so I will discuss both in this article. Molyneux is famous for creating innovative and unique games that have unusual concepts and themes, most notably the ‘god-sim’ type games. Dungeon Keeper is no different and is hugely innovative game that has yet to have any real challengers to its own subgenre of real time strategy in the nearly 12 years since its release.

Dungeon Keeper is real time strategy game with a difference. You play as a Dungeon Keeper, an evil being whose sole purpose is to destroy the land of goodly hero’s in the world above. The games imagery, sound effects and atmosphere do much for the creepy overall feel. Despite the evil and dark setting, there is large amount of humour that works very well, with the second game in particular being one of the funniest I have played in all my years of being a nerd.

You play as a malignant incorporeal entity residing underground within a large construct called your Dungeon Heart. This is the epicentre of your domain, where you yourself reside within the gameworld. The standard strategy elements are here, resource gathering, base building, gathering up your army then sending it off to battle while you revel in the carnage. But there the similarities end. The whole game is located underground. You expand and build up your dungeon by tunnelling into the surrounding rock. As you go, you hollow out cavities which you then use to build rooms. The layout of your dungeon is only hampered by certain environmental obstacles, like water, natural caverns, lava lakes or impenetrable rock, the latter usually only there to mark the border of the game map. This give the player a huge amount of freedom in building their subterranean fortress, with every dungeon you build having a unique layout.

Each level is differnet, allowing the player literally limitless ways to build and design your dungeon

Now, as a Dungeon Keeper, you have a certain handicap. Being incorporeal you are unable to physically manipulate the world yourself. But the game has an excellent solution to your problem. When you start the game, you notice small creatures running around your dungeon heart. These are your Imps. These are your hands and tools within the world. With a simple click, they will run off to the designated area and begin excavating the tunnels and rooms you have designated with boundless enthusiasm. They never tire, grow hungry or complain, even when you slap them to make them work faster. When you have assigned them no tasks they will traverse you dungeon repairing walls, clear away corpses and generally maintain your fortress of evil. Truly model employees. However, they are small feeble things that cannot fight or cause much trouble on their own.

So in order to perpetrate some evil deeds, acts of violence and cause general disruption, you need some more powerful creatures. In order to recruit them, you must tunnel towards a portal. There are usually several scattered around a map, and once you’ve tunnelled to and claimed a portal, the gates of hell are now open, spewing forth a tide of horror that you can quickly get on the payroll. There is a large variety of foul monsters you can attract to your dungeon, from huge overgrown flies and other insects, demon spawn, dragons, trolls to leather bound S&M dominatrix with a taste for murder and foreplay. The number of different evil creatures is really expansive resulting in a large and hugely varied army as you advance through the levels. They all have their own strengths and weaknesses, skills and abilities, that you will usually need to exploit as the game progresses.

Creatures are attracted to your dungeon depending on the combination of rooms you have constructed. There are many different rooms available that all perform different functions. Your creatures need to be sustained and nurtured, so rooms such as lairs to provide housing, and hatcheries to provide food are essential from the beginning. Other rooms are then required to attract specific monsters and allow certain tasks to be completed. The slovenly bile demon requires a vast hatchery, while a fully stocked library will attract the attention of warlocks. Workshops construct traps and doors, libraries research new spells while torture chambers allow you to extract information from prisoners. The different combinations of rooms you have doesn’t guarantee you’ll always get the creatures you want, so your army in each level will be different on every play through.


The games is played from a top down isometric view and move fast and smoothly. One of the most interesting and fun aspects is the ability to possess your creatures and control them like you would in a first person shooter. This is a cool feature, its lots of fun wandering around your dungeon from your creatures perspective. You can attack and cast spells as well as perform functions around your dungeon should you choose. Each creature type also has unique and interesting ways of viewing the world, but this never has any negative impact on the game play and adds greatly to the depth.

All of your rooms cost money, as does your army, with periodic paydays being announced where all of your minions stop what their doing and march off towards your treasury demanding their well earned coin. Money is provided by mining out gold seams, which you imps then dutifully carry back to your treasury. Most levels provide you with only a limited amount of gold, so it usually not wise to sit in your fortress for too long, as certain other tasks such as training creatures, building and a few others all cost money, putting a constant drain on your funds. In some levels, gem seams can be found. These can never be mined out and provide an infinite source of money, however they take longer to mine and are often located in hard to reach spots.

Your primary foes in the game the goodly heroes from the sunlit world above as well as rival dungeon keepers. Heroes are found as you tunnel through the level, or as they come tunnelling into your dungeon. Knights, fairies, wizards, barbarians and even samurai all seek your down fall. When entering combat, your creatures will charge towards their selected target firing spells and screaming. As they fight, a ‘health flower’ will appear above their head, with each petal disappearing as they take damage. You can pick up creatures and drop them into combat, or similarly pick them up out of combat if they are unlikely to survive the encounter. Each creature has its own variety of spells, some of which are quite humorous with bile demons farting a cloud of poisonous gas that harms both friend and foe.

As mentioned earlier, the two games are very similar.

DK 2 in its 3D glory. Note the early lighting effects

Graphically, the original Dungeon Keeper uses a mix of 2D sprites for the creatures and certain objects, while the landscape is 3D. The game looked good when it came out and doesn’t look too bad today, but the graphics haven’t aged well. In Dungeon Keeper 2 however, there is a huge graphical leap, with the game looking great even today. The whole game has being moved to 3D, with all creatures and objects looking detailed and interesting. In the first instalment your Dungeon Heart is represented as a large glowing jewel, while in the second, it is an pulsating organic mass embedded in the earth. The game also uses early dynamic lighting effects well as well as rendered water and lava. The interface is slick and presented well, while the whole game moves fast and smoothly. The intro cinematic is also great as well as the numerous cut scenes played between most levels.

It is very clear from the second game that the developers learned a great deal from the first. The sequel is highly refined, most of the issues from the first game are remedied and there is much more attention focused on story telling and atmosphere. Several rooms have been removed and new ones added, such as the combat pit or casino. Gameplay has been left mostly untouched mainly because it worked so well. There have been some adjustment with the addition of an added resource known as mana, used for spells and to sustain your imps.

DK2 is one of the funniest games I have ever played. Your mentor/narrator, voiced by Richard Ridings, has a decidingly evil voice. He constantly informs the player of their tasks, gives helpful advice and the occasional humorous messages, like warning the player of an invasion of micro-piglets, or that your creatures demand cable. The game also uses your computers calendar to tell the date and time, telling the player to go to bed if its late or else relaying holiday specific messages, e.g. ‘Trick or Treat Keeper’. One of the most memorable moments is when a creature wins the jackpot in the casino. Over the evil ominous soundtrack can be heard the 1976 disco classic ‘Disco Inferno’, and all the creatures in the casino begin to dance to the music, with each species of creature possessing its own dance style. While these are small touches, they add a huge amount of fun to the game.

A helpful reminder of your need for central heating

There are some problems though. These mainly focus on the AI, which tends to be rather poor, especially when it comes to other dungeon keepers. They tend to just sit behind their walls and do nothing until you attack, or sometime allow you to take over much of their dungeon with minimal resistance. There isn’t much consistency in the difficulty of the later levels, mainly in the first game, which can be disappointingly easy. Some early levels can be very difficult, while some of the last missions are a breeze. An example would be where an AI keeper occasionally kills itself by digging right into the centre of a heroes fortress for no apparent reason and getting killed. You only find this out when you abruptly win the level having not even begun your attack. I had some stability issues with the second game, but nothing too serious.

So in conclusion, these are some of the best, most original and innovative games ever made. DK was a milestone in gaming with dark and interesting gameplay. DK2 lifted the bar considerably with its great graphics, atmosphere and hilarious writing. I still find myself playing this game on a regular basis despite its age, still feeling as fresh and fun as it did when I first played it at the tender age of 14. It is a tremendous shame we never got to see DK3 which was cancelled way back in 2000. Bullfrog was assimilated by the ever expanding Borg collective *cough* sorry, EA, in 2004. Due to a lack of any creativity in EA these days, they have announced they will be robbing the grave of Bullfrog to revisit some of their games. So maybe we might see another Dungeon Keeper in a few years. Whether this can live up to the originals only time will tell.

Only a fool would disturb the grave of such a terrifing beast

StarGuard Review

Starguard Review

Starguard is a basic flash based side scrolling platform game where you play a venusian spaceman, part of a large force of soldiers invading a wizards castle. The game is unrelated to the old miniature war game or the 1955 novel.

The story is told through a series of short paragraphs that appear on the wall behind the player. It is a simple affair where the people of Venus created the wizard to herald in a time of peace and prosperity. The wizard then rebelled, slaughtering billions with his monsters and taking over the planet, residing in a mighty fortress. So you play one of the lucky guys invading the castle, the last attempt by the people of Venus to kill the wizard.

The graphics and interface are very basic, making the game fun and easy to play. He game looks very much like an old game from the Atari 2600, and has similar sound effects. The game take the form of a castle that the player has to navigate, avoiding obstacles and shooting enemies. There are 9 levels where the player moves either left or right, while descending down into the castle. The levels steadily increase in difficulty with quicker moving obstacles as well as more numerous and tougher foes. There is a reliance on pattern recognition puzzles later in the game, with some becoming very tough indeed.

Many of the levels employ sections where large beams or projectile launchers are placed in a pattern or row on a wall, firing in a specific sequence. This means the player has to time their jumps and movements so they land by the gun that is not firing, then move along following the gap in the projectiles. This can be fun, but got a bit annoying during the final levels as I felt it was a bit overdone.

The games combat is frenetic and fun. The players weapon fires as quickly as you can tap the keyboard, so you can often fill the screen with a barrage of projectiles. The fast pace of much of the combat and jumping puzzles is very satisfying to complete, but really frustrating to fail. The enemies death animations are well done despite the primitive graphics.

Some enemies are easy to kill, usually dispatched with one or two hits, but there are several others that take a serious amount of punishment to kill, only to resurrect in a different even stronger form once you’ve walked past their remains. As the player moves through the level, checkpoints are uncovered allowing the player to respawn when you die.

While the graphics are obviously very basic, there is a certain charm to them. The simple colour scheme is consistent as is the gameplay. While the game will not win any awards for story telling or gripping atmosphere, there are lots of other little green pixelated men fighting and dying along side you, so at least there is the sense that you are part of a larger attack. The game is addictive and doesn’t let you go easily, meaning you will probably complete it on your first sitting. While the difficulty I played it on is by no means impossible, it can get quite hard later in the game, and the last boss is very difficult. However, there is enough of a challenge to make the game playable and not too easy at the same time. So overall, an addictive game that looks good, sounds good and will have me coming back next time Iv got half an hour to kill.

Assassin's Creed

I have finally gotten Assassin's Creed. Iv heard much but know little. I am eagerly awaiting installation so i can finally see what all the fuss is about. Watch this space for a review in a few weeks.