Sunday, January 27, 2008
Slayer01's 3 Up 3 Down Video Review
Episode 001: Assassin's Creed
Just a few words about some things I like (and don't) about Assassin's Creed.
Just a few words about some things I like (and don't) about Assassin's Creed.
Labels: 2007, action, adventure, assassin's creed, game, stab in the neck, video review
Friday, January 18, 2008
X-MEN (The Arcade Game): One of America's Favorite Beat 'em Ups Revisited
One of my favorite arcade games growing up was X-MEN (1992), known to many as X-MEN: The Arcade Game. In case you've never played the game, it's a sidescrolling beat 'em up which was riding the popularity of games like Double Dragon (1987), Final Fight (1989), and Streets of Rage (1991), which were all very popular arcade-styled games involving hand-to-hand combat (sometimes with various handheld weapons) where the player directs his or her character from one side of the screen to the other, beating up generic thugs and a few other types of enemies before you get to the boss of each particular level. In X-MEN, the same concept applies but instead of weapons you get mutant powers respective to the character you choose, which are a blessing and a curse, as I'll explain later. So basically, you get to the end of the level, beat the boss, and you're onto the next level with a few cut scenes in between to explain the simplistic (but not unwelcome) story for the game.
Recently I decided it was time to go back and see how X-MEN held up. I was also seeking revenge since I don't remember ever beating the game as it seemed to always eat up all the tokens I had. I figured that my older, more talented and experienced self would have no problems tearing through the game on just a handful of credits.
Well, I was wrong. I played through it and discovered a lot of things. Among these the fact that I wasn't giving my former self enough credit. This game is tough, but not in the right way. It is a very cheap game. The kind of game that makes you want to give up but not after already pumping in a few dollars worth of quarters and then discovering said cheapness.
This game has several flaws which hinder enjoyment:
- The Inevitability of Death. This is by far the greatest flaw in the game. You WILL die in this game. Lots. Some of the reasons that follow in this list will help explain this, but it's mainly because the game doesn't follow the ethos of arcade games: Reward the player for being good. The game does no such thing, and being good only entails that you are getting punished less than the average player.
- No Power-Ups. Throughout the level you will be outnumbered and there will be hits which you will almost certainly have to take, and there are no health bonuses or anything that will increase your attacking abilities. There aren't even any interactive weapons that you can pick up, and although that might seem stupid since the X-MEN have mutant powers, you should be able to get some kind of temporary advantage over your foes, if not just to break up the repetition. Your only reward is given at the end of the levels after beating the bosses, an extra orb for additional mutant power usage. This is not a good deal.
- Mutant Powers = Pain? The fact that your character's mutant power hurts you unless you have three or less bars of health is just stupid. When you have three or less, you can use your special orb(s) up, which is usually going to be just one since you will probably have died and not beaten a boss in between deaths. Coupled with no health restoration (unless you count adding tokens to respawn--I don't!), this game is unforgiving and this would be slightly more okay if you could just use your power without simultaneously harming yourself.
- Redundant Enemies. Get used to fighting mini-Sentinels in all their palette-swapping glory, because by the end of the game you will be fighting hundreds of these for no reason whatsoever, along with some bazooka toting Sentinel-esque enemies and some laser machines which look like something you'd see in a metal cutting shop.
- Repetitive and Crippled Attacking. Also get used to the same three-hit combos and a couple of other animated attacks, such as a random throw or turnaround attack that seems to work better for some characters than others. Yes, Colossus sucks in this game because he will be unable to fend off attackers on his backside mostly without using a special, which leads to the Catch-22 of you taking damage to deal damage no matter how you approach the situation. Nevermind the fact that your attack combos can and will be broken by the bosses mercilessly, forcing you to use life-shaving mutant powers which in turn lead to death.
As I said, the game still can be enjoyable. However, this game would have held up better if it had better balancing that worked more in favor of the player's skills rather than his wallet.
Labels: 1992, beat 'em ups, genre analysis, helmholz, konami, reviews, x-men
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Video Game Movies: They Only Seem Like a Good Idea....
Recently at the cinemas, the notorious Uwe Boll's newest film, In The Name of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, was released to little fanfare from both audiences and his most dedicated followers. Perhaps it was a sign that the better he got at making films, the more unwatchable that they became; perhaps it was the stigma of January being the dumping ground of awful programming that only becomes successful because it's either a broad comedy or an inoffensive action film (or, as an alternate answer, it's a film made by one of Sony's movie studios and ran ads every two seconds on TV). Whatever the case may be, ITNOTK's failure really can't blamed on either of those things, or that it is, in fact, a film directed by Uwe Boll; video game films simply haven't lit the charts on fire since Angelina Jolie managed to make millions of dollar by keeping her clothes on for Tomb Raider in 2001 (but only the first one; the second film's failure was, amusingly, blamed on the poor reception of Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness).
The biggest reason behind this is fairly obvious: people will flock to the films that they've heard about and may have actually played. At first, this may seem like a flawed and an even unreliable explanation, especially given the early failures of films like Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter. However, there was nothing in the advertising for the Super Mario Bros. film that could ever be mistaken for something that was actually inspired by the game millions bought and loved, opting for a more Gilliam-esque approach to the setting. Street Fighter's failure is obvious if you even so much as glanced at the publicity still for the film, revealing it for the "you cannot be serious" cheesiness that inevitably ended up ignored by the public. For a while, it actually seemed as though that the can't miss combination of video games and films was less "peanut butter and jelly" and more "peanut butter and live hand grenade." In 1995, Mortal Kombat all changed that, and it's actually not hard to see why:
1.) It wasn't a dramatic departure from the source material. As I mentioned, the Super Mario Bros. film looked less like the Mushroom Kingdom and more like Time Bandits, minus all the craft; outside of the lack of gore, Mortal Kombat managed to actually resemble the game it was based off, even if it did borrow liberally from Enter the Dragon.
2.) It delivered the action without taxing its audience. Street Fighter's focus was on Guile, but the film often made detours into the histories of the other characters, shifting around with little regard for the patience that the crowd that it primarily targeted. Mortal Kombat, on the other hand, wisely kept the focus on the three hero characters who all had simple motivations for participating in the tournament, with their supporting characters only there to essentially cheer them on while they fought against the villains.
3.) It was a movie based on the most popular game on earth at the time. Super Mario Bros. came out at a time when a blue hedgehog captivated children, whereas Street Fighter's success laid more in the arcades at the time rather than in homes. In 1995, you couldn't walk anywhere without walking into something related to Mortal Kombat; the sequel had just been recently released into arcades with a home port due later that year and the first game was a best-seller.
The film being a success wasn't in question; the degree of success, however, was what took Hollywood by surprise. The film made back it's entire budget ($20 million) in its opening weekend and went on to earn more than $100 million worldwide, an unheard of sum at that time for the fledgling genre. However, this surge ended rather quickly when Mortal Kombat: Annihilation bombed two years later.
Since then, success has always come in the form of "one film does decent-good, three more do awful." For every blockbuster pre-packaged for success like Tomb Raider, you have expensive failures like Wing Commander and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within that fail. The Resident Evil and Silent Hill franchises do well enough to justify making sequels (and not much else), but no one was clamoring for House of the Dead 2 or BloodRayne 2. Timing also affected films that were long in gestation, Doom, Hitman and Dead or Alive being forgotten even before they came out.
Maybe audiences just don't want these kinds films; if that's the case, Hollywood needs to reconsider what they can actually sell to audiences. The Halo film seemed like a no brainer, but that project is considered dead these days. Films with less broad appeal like Spy Hunter and Driver remain in limbo. There's other films further off like Onimusha and the much anticipated/dreaded Metal Gear Solid, but is it enough. This isn't the best argument since films based off of comic books continue to do well, with no less than three adaptations poised to do monster business in 2008
What could be the ultimate problem is that in this day and age, we don't need films based off our the games we play to really appreciate them. With budgets being comparable to actual Hollywood production, we can get the same kind of action that they can provide, but in the comfort of our own living rooms. Why drive to the theater to see an action/sci-fi film when you could fire up Gears of War for a couple of hours? A decade ago, you would never have thought that Hollywood's biggest competition wouldn't have come from a box you attach to your TV, but you have to figure they said similar things when the TV itself was introduced.
The biggest reason behind this is fairly obvious: people will flock to the films that they've heard about and may have actually played. At first, this may seem like a flawed and an even unreliable explanation, especially given the early failures of films like Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter. However, there was nothing in the advertising for the Super Mario Bros. film that could ever be mistaken for something that was actually inspired by the game millions bought and loved, opting for a more Gilliam-esque approach to the setting. Street Fighter's failure is obvious if you even so much as glanced at the publicity still for the film, revealing it for the "you cannot be serious" cheesiness that inevitably ended up ignored by the public. For a while, it actually seemed as though that the can't miss combination of video games and films was less "peanut butter and jelly" and more "peanut butter and live hand grenade." In 1995, Mortal Kombat all changed that, and it's actually not hard to see why:
1.) It wasn't a dramatic departure from the source material. As I mentioned, the Super Mario Bros. film looked less like the Mushroom Kingdom and more like Time Bandits, minus all the craft; outside of the lack of gore, Mortal Kombat managed to actually resemble the game it was based off, even if it did borrow liberally from Enter the Dragon.
2.) It delivered the action without taxing its audience. Street Fighter's focus was on Guile, but the film often made detours into the histories of the other characters, shifting around with little regard for the patience that the crowd that it primarily targeted. Mortal Kombat, on the other hand, wisely kept the focus on the three hero characters who all had simple motivations for participating in the tournament, with their supporting characters only there to essentially cheer them on while they fought against the villains.
3.) It was a movie based on the most popular game on earth at the time. Super Mario Bros. came out at a time when a blue hedgehog captivated children, whereas Street Fighter's success laid more in the arcades at the time rather than in homes. In 1995, you couldn't walk anywhere without walking into something related to Mortal Kombat; the sequel had just been recently released into arcades with a home port due later that year and the first game was a best-seller.
The film being a success wasn't in question; the degree of success, however, was what took Hollywood by surprise. The film made back it's entire budget ($20 million) in its opening weekend and went on to earn more than $100 million worldwide, an unheard of sum at that time for the fledgling genre. However, this surge ended rather quickly when Mortal Kombat: Annihilation bombed two years later.
Since then, success has always come in the form of "one film does decent-good, three more do awful." For every blockbuster pre-packaged for success like Tomb Raider, you have expensive failures like Wing Commander and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within that fail. The Resident Evil and Silent Hill franchises do well enough to justify making sequels (and not much else), but no one was clamoring for House of the Dead 2 or BloodRayne 2. Timing also affected films that were long in gestation, Doom, Hitman and Dead or Alive being forgotten even before they came out.
Maybe audiences just don't want these kinds films; if that's the case, Hollywood needs to reconsider what they can actually sell to audiences. The Halo film seemed like a no brainer, but that project is considered dead these days. Films with less broad appeal like Spy Hunter and Driver remain in limbo. There's other films further off like Onimusha and the much anticipated/dreaded Metal Gear Solid, but is it enough. This isn't the best argument since films based off of comic books continue to do well, with no less than three adaptations poised to do monster business in 2008
What could be the ultimate problem is that in this day and age, we don't need films based off our the games we play to really appreciate them. With budgets being comparable to actual Hollywood production, we can get the same kind of action that they can provide, but in the comfort of our own living rooms. Why drive to the theater to see an action/sci-fi film when you could fire up Gears of War for a couple of hours? A decade ago, you would never have thought that Hollywood's biggest competition wouldn't have come from a box you attach to your TV, but you have to figure they said similar things when the TV itself was introduced.
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