After taking a look at how Hollywood has become nothing more than a lazy copycat with only a handful of really talented individuals actually giving the medium fresh ideas, we now take a look at the video game side of the equation.
Part 2: cheap tricks and sub-standard merchandise
We want readers to take a number of things away from the first part of the article. Firstly, Hollywood projects are always ‘inspired’ by other mediums such as books, comics, television series and video games.
Secondly, not all of them are bad, with many almost reaching the same level as the books or wherever they found their ‘inspiration’.
However, when it comes to video games adaptations of films and vice versa, things, more often, than not, end in disaster, which is a shame.
It is a shame because, unlike Hollywood, video games are perhaps the most original when it comes to creating worlds, characters, storylines and providing immersive entertainment. Books are still number one in that respect, yet one thing that video games have and books don’t is an element of interactivity.
Max Payne was a great game when it came out on consoles and PC all those years ago. It was dark, gritty, flashy and savage all at the same time. It had Hollywood like qualities but that didn’t mean it wasn’t unoriginal.
Yet, when it came to its adaptation onto the big screen, it was mess from start to finish. There were many things that the game was remembered for; the stylish kills, slo-mo kills and the bad-a*s nature of Max Payne.
The movie barely had one of those things and decided to get all creative and bring in winged demons and hallucinatory drugs into the mix. Not only did that kill the essence of what Max Payne was all about but movie goers who never played the game never respected the inspiration behind the appalling movie.
It was a blow to the video game industry as gamers had to convince their non-gaming peers that ‘the game is actually really good.’ After an experience like that it would’ve been harder to believe.
Take another example, that of the film adaptation of Tekken which was released last year. By Hollywood standards it was nothing but a low-budget movie with adult-film stars cast as deadly fighters, whereas the game offered a rich and immersive universe.
The best bits of the movie were when the fighters pulled off their signature moves, or when the audience saw another character from the game. The film deserves no credit for that as that came directly from the game itself.
Many people will not have seen House of the Dead and they ought to be grateful for it. The movie was a disaster from start to finish. The game it was based on was an on-rails arcade shooter which meant that the script writers had plenty of freedom to do what they wanted with the story as long as lots of zombies got shot.
Read on in the http://www.senore.com/Hollywood-needs-to-take-Video-Games-more-seriously-Rant-Part-3-a150179 to find out how they screwed that and many more video game based films up and also take a look at the few they did right.
Disclaimer: the views and opinions expressed in this article are the writer’s own and do not reflect the editorial policy of Bettor.com. He was greatly upset by the Max Payne movie among others and feels that it is about time that video games get their due respect.
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