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All Your Article Belong to Us (so...Video Games Articles) Note 1: If you play a lot of video games regularly, you might find the time taken in these articles to describe the basic gameplay and plots of popular titles discussed a bit frustrating before getting to the meat of theme or idea of the piece. But that's because the video game community is expanding everyday, with a lot of fresh-faced button mashers (y'know, noobs) getting interested. And the easier it is for them to join the party, the bigger the dubs for us all.
Note 2: There is already the big Zelda series of articles (start here), and there is also a chunk of writing on gaming embedded within the big Here's a Thought Department (warp right to it), but here are other pieces on this wonderful art form.
Press X to Doubt: The Challenges of the Video Game Movie Adaptation
Spoiler Alert and
TL/DR: Most stories in video games are simple/lousy. Which means making
movies out of them starts off on a bad foot.
Here’s the handy
Wikipedia spreadsheet, where the Rotten Tomatoes/ Metacritic scores don’t
lie: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_video_games)
A vast majority of
video game narratives are either fantasy-centric anime films for twelve
year olds, or a re-hashed sub-plots from a sci-fi/western/post-apocalyptic
movies and tv series.
We haven’t gotten
to a point where there is the storytelling equivalent of
The Wire or Apocalypse Now,
and we might never get it until the video game medium itself changes in
radical ways.
Why?
Time.
To get right to
the existential heart of it, you only have so much of it to spend in your
life, and only a fraction of that to spend playing video games (the exact
fraction can obviously differ greatly from person to person). And your
interactivity with this made-up world via the controller in your hand (or
keyboard at your fingertips) is limited not only by the basic idea of
providing entertaining interactivity (press a button to…let’s be
honest…you’re probably expected to kill something), but the cinematic
storytelling mantra of only showing the good and important parts.
Plenty of RPGs and
action adventure video games give nods to influential pop culture material
like Akira and
The Walking Dead, but nowhere near that quality of narrative setup
and pacing because you have to break up the story to let you…play. To do
stuff. It might seem easy to just have you take control at the start of a
gunfight just where one would be in any movie or tv series, but bland
practicalities and baked-in expectations for video games quickly get in
the way.
A two hour action
movie might be half action sequences at most, with the rest being, y’know,
acting. You can’t make a game that has that exact ratio, since that is an
extremely short game, and a very, very short time of actually playing if
you just have control during this planned hour of action sequences.
A ten minute
cut-scene to build up character development and narrative tension? That’s
eons of having a controller in your hand and not doing anything. And then
ten minutes of gameplay (that is hopefully good) is ridiculously short,
especially if it is followed by another lengthy cut-scene that is meant to
once again reinforce the story and push it forward.
So problem number
one: You can’t slice up an action movie or a tv series arc and make a
video game out of it. Finding the balance of cut-scenes and gameplay is
extremely difficult, and it is absolutely not 50-50.
The expectation is
that you will let the player actually play the game for a vast majority of
the time, and that means giving them stuff to do, and ideally fun stuff.
In the film Die Hard it’s great
to watch John McClane yell at Hans Gruber over walkie-talkie’s, but it
doesn’t translate to good gameplay (even if you have a QuickTime event
where you have to hold X or A for McClane to respond fast enough with a
clever quip).
While John McClane
kills twelve terrorists/thieves over the course of 2 hours in the movie,
in the 1996 video game Die Hard
(and yes, that is absolutely a thing) he kills that amount in about the
first two minutes, because just killing twelve enemies in an entire video
game is only okay if we’re strictly talking about amount of boss fights.
So what else can John McClane do for all those hours of gameplay if you
are trying to be faithful to the source material? Sneak around without
shoes? Eat candy bars? Berate every cop outside except Al Powell?
Life simulator
games notwithstanding, the most popular activity in all of video game-dom
is grinding your enemies to dust, and in early titles there were just
waves of alien ships and ghosts in arcade cabinets, and you never shed a
tear for all the goombas and Koopas you stomped as Mario. Nowadays it’s
still hordes of enemies, which can be a challenge if you want to tell a
good, affecting story where the lead character has to slowly become an
unstoppable killing machine. Doom Guy slaughters tons of disgusting evil
demons with wild weapons. Not only is that a fun description, it’s also
the entire plot of every Doom game.
John Marston and
Arthur Morgan kill bank employees, policemen, innocent bystanders and
anyone who might be leaning to close to the edge of a cliff, but then you
can pay off your bounty for these crimes so that all is forgiven in the
eyes of the law and society. Because the murdering must go on, especially
if that’s how you advance the narrative the game is trying to tell.
In many recent
open world games (like the Red Dead
Redemption series), stories are divided between main and side quests.
The former involves engaging with non-playable characters (NPCs) and
completing missions and tasks that will ultimately lead to the end of the
game and the credits, whereas the latter deals with you throwing this
responsibility by the wayside so you can make/tell your own story of
discovering what the fictional world has to offer. Ideally the side quests
will give the impression of a more authentic and in-depth setting, even if
it’s just padding. You have to tell a story in a much more passive way
while highlighting the unique aspects of game play (exploring the top of
that mountain for treasure, killing evil people in the woods who are
unrelated to the main plot, or maybe even helping people in town find
their chickens or frying pan).
If the choice is
not what to do, then it might be who to do it as.
Seeing the same
story from other characters’ perspectives has been used to great success
in a handful of films (from Rashamon
to Courage Under Fire and
countless police procedurals), and since video game have allowed you to
play as various characters for many years now (although in the 80s it
might just mean one character can jump higher, or has a stronger attack),
it seems like it would be a great way to explore simple-ish stories in
different ways.
Mass Effect is a
sci-fi space epic involving humans traversing the galaxy and making
alliances with alien races and fighting other ones, and while that sounds
like…almost every other game with a spaceship…this one has one has old
school RPG story choices that can change the path of narrative in big and
small ways. You can chose different characters to play as so that NPCs
react to you differently. Sometimes you wouldn’t be able to see where the
other choice leads until a second playthrough.
Nier Automata does an
excellent job at the pace of introducing supporting characters and
transitioning to playing as them instead of the initial protagonist on
successive playthroughs.
The slight caveat
to this is the rising FOMO. You wonder what would have happened if you
decided to accept Character X’s help instead of spurning him because of
his previous lies, and then gamers remorse starts to bubble inside of you.
On top of this,
from a developer’s perspective, multiple storylines and sequences can make
game design much more difficult simply because it’s more game to design
(and why text-based versions from the eighties could offer more branching
‘choose your own adventure’-like paths).
But overall very
familiar narratives and themes can certainly feel fresh and exhilarating
by the choices that video games offer players (you’re not just watching
the hero and villain battle out, you’re playing as the hero!).
The flip side of
this is best exemplified by Naughty Dog Games’ two best known series,
Uncharted and
The Last of Us, both of which are held up as paragons of video game
storytelling, because there is only the main story to play through.
So of course they
rip off generic film clichés hard. The fact that talking about these games
means having to include a spoiler alert warning reinforces just how
movie-like they are. Uncharted
nicks Indiana Jones and The Last of
Us is all zombie survival, best exemplified by
The Walking Dead. The latter being the best example of leading
players by the nose and seamlessly going from watching the characters
argue to suddenly controlling them when soldiers or zombies suddenly
attack, so that the overall experience is (mostly) smoothly going from
movie to pressing buttons.
The first
Last of Us was lauded for having
incredible pacing and never having enemy encounters become too repetitive,
but the flip side of that comes the light criticisms of the game being too
short.
The sequel
rectified this in a most ingenuous way. Play as a familiar character for
half the game, and plays as the ‘enemy’ for the other half so you’ll
generate sympathy for them, which will culminate in an interesting final
showdown. And it almost worked.
While the success of the Last
of Us proves that some
players don’t want to weigh the pros and cons of big decisions if it can instead
be spent shooting zombies in the
face, ironically, the story of The
Last of Us Part 2 is about making difficult decisions and then
regretting them, even though the player is never in the position to make
any. It means Naughty Dog chooses to have a message about the cycle of
violence through forced story cut-scenes over choices within gameplay.
Taken to the most
extreme, there are games like Gone
Home and What Remains of Edith
Finch, titles that remove so much agency from the player that there is
only ‘choosing’ to watch cut-scenes in a certain order (with the odd
puzzle thrown in). They are referred to semi-dismissively as ‘walking
simulators’, where any real challenge (the ‘game’ in video game) is not
present at all. In Edith Finch your character is walking through a strange house full
of family secrets, with the point not being battling anything at all, but
simply piecing together the important life moments of your grandparents,
parents, and uncles and aunts.
So while these are
the most movie-like games in terms of telling a complex story, they are
decried by many in the video game community as not being games at all.
While everything
discussed so far is how movies can influence stories in video games, going
the other way is much more difficult. This is because most video game
stories are 'high concept' pitches in their entirety, and having to flesh
out a more detailed narrative around it (with y'know, well done plot
twists and good dialogue) was not really a focus with the producers of
video game-based films in the 1990s, because it was treated with the same
care as merchandise like t-shirts, pens, posters and backpacks.
To go back to the
1970s, the earliest video games were electronic versions of real sports (Pong).
The entire 'story' of Space Invaders
was the title. Mario had to save the princess, but it was running and
jumping in thirty-two well-designed levels (and seven 'princess is in
another castle' plot twists) that made the game fun and memorable.
These early
technological restraints (games could be 7 kilobyte files) characterized
what video games were (it’s right there in the name: ‘games’) and what
they were expected to be. Moving away from the repetition of arcade games
and harder levels, mechanics and creative ways to manipulate the character
was the focus. As the industry became very, very successful in the late
eighties, that success meant what games were at the time became the
template (call it the Miyamoto model, if you will).
Around the same
time, table-top role playing games - lots of talking, lots of decisions
around story developments, lots of dice rolls - made the transition to the
electronic medium, because as long as it was kept all text it could fit in
these meagre files (and run on the new and fancy home computers). RPGs
could have more detailed and complex stories because words is what the
developers stuffed the floppy disc or microchip with instead of other game
assets like different levels or detailed animations. While the
Ultima and
Bard’s Tale Series were the big
PC ones, because Japan was at the forefront of video game hardware and
software development for most of the eighties (especially after the 1983
crash in North America), series like
Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest
became long running series that epitomized JRPGs (J is for Japanese, by
the way).
As the tech got
better in the nineties, suddenly you could have gameplay and story working
much more harmoniously, but the latter was still primarily the territory
of RPGs, with ChronoTrigger and
Final Fantasy VII being clear standouts of the decade. These styles
of games would continue to add more real time action mechanics while
retain deep story, culminating with
2006’s Okami, which tells a
mythic story of gods fighting as well as the doings of villagers in feudal
Japan with the emotional connection being a mute white wolf with a chatty
bug-sized ‘human’ for a sidekick.
These games felt
like a seasons’ worth of anime episodes, which is a good indication that
tv series might be the better choice for video game adaptations than two
hour films.
Now it should be
pointed out quickly that their level of storytelling was/is equivalent
anime/kids tv series (even if the graphical content might be more violent
or deadly), which is why the first and obvious step for video games was t0
turn them into kids cartoon shows. In the eighties there were many quick
and cheaply made cartoons based on
Mario, Donkey Kong, and The
Legend of Zelda. And they all ranged from forgettable to terrible.
But they were
meant to be fun advertisements for the hardware and software, and that
approach was...not used for the first live-action movie based on a video
game, 1993’s Super Mario Bros.
How do you turn a one line story and 32 levels into a ninety minute film?
Not like this legendary disaster that abandoned the bright, cartoony
atmosphere of the games in hopes that a more intense and darker tone would
expand the audience (and box office receipts) beyond eight year olds.
It didn’t.
The eight year
olds were very, very confused:
Wait, King Koopa
was now a human and a president…and played by Dennis Hopper? And the
lizard-like creatures were called Goombas? And why is John Leguizamo
playing Luigi as the cooler younger brother?
And anyone older
thought it was confusing AND stupid, because it can be two things.
The movie starts
in New York City, and while Bob Hoskins certainly looked the part of a
middle-aged moustachioed plumber named Mario, it quickly went off the
rails. The Mushroom Kingdom is not full of green fields, blue skies and
several perky toads serving a Princess Peach in a castle, but cyberpunk
sewers with the name Dinohattan, a Princess Daisy (but not that Daisy), a
guitarist named Toad, and Yoshi looking like a velociraptor.
Oh and guns. Mario
and Luigi shoot guns.
While some credit
might be given to the set and costume design if you were completely
unfamiliar with the games, the other important parts – story, dialogue,
acting – were irredeemable.
Its failure both
critically and commercially (cost$48 million, made $39 million) meant
Nintendo would become even more protective over its IPs (intelligent
properties, which really just means franchises) going forward.
But because the
nineties was an even better decade for video game profits than the
eighties, many other game franchises threw their hats into the cinematic
ring, even if their narratives were no better than plumbers rescuing a
princess in the mushroom kingdom.
Both
Street Fighter (1994) and
Mortal Kombat (1995) worked better than Super Mario in the sense that
it was easier to tell a story about world domination or a fighting
competition with world domination on the line with a wider roster of
human(like) characters compared to Mario.
But ‘worked
better’ is not the same thing as good. The plots were dumb, the dialogue
was as good as video game text, and the on screen talent chewed the
scenery because this was still when no self-respecting and financially
solvent actor would put on a cape unless the film had the word ‘Bat’ in
the title.
But because the
key tween and teenage demographics were not so discerning, they helped the
films turn a profit (Kombat made
$122 million, and so of course got a sequel a couple years later) and
that’s all Hollywood needs to know to green light more projects as the
century flipped. Some project budgets got big enough to compete with other
blockbusters and drew in some quality talent.
Fresh off her
Oscar win in 2000, Angelina Jolie took the role of Lara Croft in
Tomb Raider. ‘Female Indiana Jones’ was the elevator pitch for the
1996 video game (with particular polygons proving beyond a doubt that she
was a woman) and 2001 movie alike, and both were massively successful.
There were more of both, and more of the same in terms of reception
(started good, got less good as they went on). Today the original game is
held in much more high regard than the film, and just as there was a
re-boot of the Tomb Raider game
series in 2013, there was one (and just one) for the film franchise in
2018.
For entertainment
based on video games made in America, it was a ‘wait and see’ approach,
not green lighting similar content until there was some proven success.
Meanwhile, in
Japan, where most of these games were developed and first released, they
were churning out animated spin-offs for the big and little screen with
regularity. Many of these films and tv series were actually based on the
manga that were based on the video game franchises, so already there were
slightly meatier stories than in the video games (while still being,
y’know, comic book stories mainly for kids).
The most
financially successful video game franchise of all time is
Pokemon by a country mile, and that is largely in part to its
success in other avenues such as tv series, films, trading cards, and oh
so many bits of merchandise.
And just as each
new game is a re-re-re-hashed version of the original Red and Blue from
the late nineties, the animated tv series and movies re-re-re-hashed the
same plot of Ash Ketchum trying to ‘ketchum’ all. But what do you want,
right? Isn’t this just stuff for eight year olds?
Even if we reach a
point where producers and studios want to make their video game
adaptations…good…it’s not easy.
As technology
improved, everything about video games got bigger and longer (ahem).
1997’s Final Fantasy VII was the
biggest adventure in gaming up to that point, and many RPGs followed in
its footsteps to create a huge cast of characters with long and winding
main narratives plus side quests. Game stories that once could be summed
up with a few sentences were now nearly novels. Instead of having to
expand a two line story to make a two hour film, now it’s a matter of
shrinking and cutting a thirty hour game down to that two hour run time.
But don’t ignore
the lore!
How do you
shoehorn in the quirky moments and miscellanea in the games that stans of
the series expect as Easter Eggs to prove that the production really does
‘get’ the essence of the series?
You can feed the
fan service flames of the ever-complicating stories in the games,
especially as success breeds sequel after sequel. It’s not the main reason
you’re in front of the screen, controller in hand, but it can absolutely
give a bit more weight to every time you fire a pistol or use a
grapple-hook.
Long-in-the-tooth
franchises sometimes completely ignore what happened in previous games (Mario,
Final Fantasy) or create convoluted explanations as to why previous
games don’t matter too much (Zelda).
For those that run
with one storyline…it gets messy.
Take
Halo, please.
Xbox’s killer app
has sold 81 million copies across the many, many releases over the last
twenty plus years, with its multiplayer mode becoming more of a selling
point than it’s ever-expanding sci-fi story (which still had plenty of
fans who wanted to find out if Master Chief is ever gonna bone the Arbiter
while Cortana watches, or something).
When making huge
profits you aren’t exactly the victims of success, but it does make
‘always a bigger threat’ story-wise harder and harder to top.
After Halo 3 the
development team did a prequel (Halo
Reach), but that’s never as clear as numbers that move forward, so
4 and 5 eventually came
down the pipe and it was a perfect example of diminishing returns.
How can you keep
raising the stakes? How many planetary or galaxy-destroying threats are
there going to be?
Halo: Infinite arrived in
the fall of 2021 after substantial delays and a $500 million price-tag,
choosing to focus on the multiplayer element (which was free to play) over
the story/campaign (which was not). It minimized much of what happened in
the previous two games and added another new villain that seemed very much
like older ones.
A few months after
this, the Halo tv series arrived
and looked just as good as Halo:
Infinite…and had a story that is just as good.
Since it’s the
first season, it makes sense to start with the first game, and it’s kinda
that, but also kinda about a brooding, masked/stone-faced killing machine
that will slowly what it means to be human.
Wait, you mean
The Mandalorian? Or
The Terminator? Or
The Iron Giant? Or 2B?
Trying to make
that trope fresh is not easy when millions of people already have a strong
emotional attachment to the story and characters before, during and after
the series’ development.
But critics at
least agreed that the Halo
series had the tone of the games, which is not always easy to do (or what
the producers are even trying to do).
Plenty of games
that have lighthearted, quirky or just plain silly moments (even if the
game itself is quite dark and serious) typical lose them when they make
the jump to movies and television.
Laughable moments
from Monster Hunter or
Doom are not allowed in the movie, lest they ruin the mood (sorry
cute sidekick cats and John Romero’s head).
Doom and its many
sequels (and rip-offs) were so over the top ridiculous and stupidly simple
at the same time that the movie could not hope to match its laser/BFG-9000
focus on blood-splattering mayhem, even with The Rock at the helm.
Throwing a ton of
money at other successful leading men existing between A and B status
became the way to do it, or at least try to do it in the mid-2000s, with
hopes that their star power will bring in non-gamers. The budgets for the
effects began to balloon, and they could afford the stars by paying them a
pittance for the first with promises of bigger pay-days, points and
producer credits if there were any sequels. See:
Prince of Persia (with Jake Gyllenhaal), Hitman
(with Timothy Ophliant), and
Assassin’s Creed (with Michael Fassbender).
Despite the
seeming straightforwardness of these games (doesn’t the title just say it
all?), crafting a two hour max tale means you have to dump tons of
backstory and sequel twists into the trash because the studio and
producers are trying to expand the audience far beyond the people who just
played the video game. The audience might read that it’s from a video game
franchise, but is just there to watch an action movie ‘starring’ the
Prince of Persia, an Assassin with a creed, or a hitman.
These movies are
made because an established fan-base is easier to tap into than a
non-existent one. And if there are guns and/or swords, then it’s just
another action flick you might as well hope will break through and make
bank. This simplicity is not
surprising when these are
movies made for
twelve year olds by…well who makes these films, actually?
While the typical
studios are bankrolling them (Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal, etc), it’s
here where we note that the director of the first
Mortal Kombat film is Paul WS
Anderson (not be confused with Paul Thomas Anderson of
Boogie Nights and There Will
Be Blood), and he would go on to oversee all six live-action
Resident Evil films,
DOA and Monster Hunter, making him something of a video game film auteur.
For nearly two
decades Resident Evil was the
most successful film series based on a video game series, even though the
movies can looks unrecognizable to the source material...despite both
being a sprawling sci-fi zombie killing franchise.
What stays and
what goes as you adapt? Keep the name Raccoon City and the Umbrella
Corporation, ditch Leon Kennedy (at first) and spooky European villages,
add a lot more advanced tech like evil AI, and split the difference by
having gruesome kills of zombie mutants that any fourteen year old (at
heart) will have to admit is cool.
But the execution
of those moments is not a one-to-one. Many of the
Resident Evil games are all
about slow creeping horror in haunted houses, although the best one (4,
of course) bucks this trend and is blueprint for the fast-paced third
person shooter. So what do you use?
What might have
been the coolest action segment in a video game (ideally around the
climax) could come off as complete schlocky, mockable moment in a film.
Putting the
feeling of interactive excitement into a movie is not easy. Do you just
take story elements, or do you use variations on bullet time or first
person perspective to give viewers a taste of what playing is like? The
only first-person-perspective movie of note is 2015’s
Hardcore Henry, as it was the
only to receive wide-release…and it was criticized for the gimmick getting
old long before the credits started to roll.
So much about
these films felt like video games, for the worse, rather than the better.
In video games,
players can choose (to varying degrees) how to balance the time they spend
doing something serious or silly, tailoring the experiences the game
offers to their wants and needs at the moment. Even 'walking simulator'
games typically have some level of exploration to reveal the story at the
player’s leisure. Movies typically don't have that luxury, as you can only
be a passive viewer who is dragged along to watch one scene after the
other.
But there have
been some attempts to change this.
The 'Bandersnatch'
episode of the bleak-comedy series
Black Mirror allows viewer to choose different story options by
pressing buttons on their remote, but even that got mixed reviews. Points
for the attempt, but it wasn’t the sort of story that many people were
eager to go back to and watch the different ways each choice would turn
out (since some of them were deciding whether to rush a video game into
production).
Complex video game
plots had to be made simple for movies, and simple video game plots had to
be complex for tv series.
But what if could
be simple all the way through?
It’s
Pokémon to the rescue.
2019’s
Detective Pikachu was the first live action film for the series, and
meant to be the video game movie that truly makes the leap from ‘meh’ to
‘hey, that was pretty good’. Based on a spin-off
Pokemon game with the same name, it meant giving Pikachu a job (it’s
right there in the title) and a voice that’s not just squeaking his name
(and was provided by…Ryan Reynolds). More importantly as far as the
production of video game movies is concerned…it did decent at the box
office.
And it worked
because it wasn’t too Pokemon-ish. The producers and writer(s) assumed
that a good chunk of the Pokemon fan base (which is considerable) will go
see the movie no matter what with only a few diehards abstaining, so they
could then focus on making a movie about a young man looking for his
missing father (with the help of a talking yellow thing in a detective’s
cap). That alone made it more interesting and had a lot more emotional
depth than any Ash-Ketchum-focused story, which was typically about
foiling comical villains, catching Pokemon and winning a tournament.
Detective Pokemon was the one of
the best reviewed video game-based movies of all time, which sounds great
until you realize that’s just a score of 68% on the now indomitable Rotten
Tomatoes aggregate site. It’s only one of five video game movies that have
ever crossed 60%.
The others?
The
Angry Birds Movie 2 (sorry,
Angry Birds Movie 1), Werewolves
Within (based on a VR game that is based on the Werewolves real-life
(!) party game) and both Sonic the
Hedgehog flicks (which stars Jim Carrey as Dr Robotnik).
Yes, even though
Mario had Sonic beat in terms of critical and commercial success in the
Console Wars in the early nineties, the Blue Hedgehog had the plumber beat
when it came making a successful jump to the big screen.
But now we are on
the cusp of The Super Mario Bros
Movie, a 2023 animated film that is expected to be huge because after
all these years the titular character remains a pop culture icon, more so
than anyone else in video games (except Sans, obviously), and the same
studio that made Despicable Me
and Minions is going to turn it into a typical kids flick.
That the previews
have looked so, so, so much better than the thirty year old live action
film is a good sign. It’s even a plus that the only so-called minus is the
unexpected announcement by Miyamoto himself that Chris Pratt is voicing
Mario, which led to plenty of mockery online. But hey, if a Hollywood leading man can voice an electrified
gerbil in Detective Pikachu, why
can’t another Hollywood leading man voice a goofy Italian plumber?
While veteran
voice actor Charles Martinet has done an iconic job playing Mario for his
comparatively few and brief lines in many Mario games (ranging from
‘okay!’ to ‘let’s-ah go!’), the gaming community acknowledges that this
particular voice would be difficult to stomach for ninety minutes, and
thanks him for his service.
The Super Mario Bros Movie
will probably be under two hours long, which is roughly the amount of time
it takes to finish the original
Super Mario Bros game from 1985, and about sixth of the amount of time
it takes to do all the stuff in the plumbers latest big adventure,
Super Mario Odyssey.
It all comes back to the true challenge of adapting
modern video games to the film. While the two entertainment mediums are borrowing liberally from each other (some superhero
movies look like video games), it comes down to the challenge of
adaptation, which comes with different issues for each project.
Clearly the success of Pokémon, Sonic and (maybe)
Mario reinforces the idea that at the moment video game movies are a
children’s experience. But that’s how people felt video games in general
in the eighties and nineties. Hopefully we won’t have to wait as long as
until someone cracks the code and makes a video game film that is
absolutely worth two hours’ of our time.
The Curious Case of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2
The first thing people point out about
Tony
Hawk’s
Pro Skater 2
(originally released on the Playstation in 2000) is that it is right
behind The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina
of Time as the second best-reviewed video game of all time on the
de-facto video game review aggregate website, Meta-Critic.
And hey, as far as ‘first things to point out’, that’s pretty damn good
one. It certainly buoys the reputation of the title, along with the genre
itself.
Skateboarding games are not exactly niche, but they don’t have the same
popularity as other sports franchises like
Madden, FIFA and
NBA2K. While the Tony Hawk series has several entries, it was never an
annual ‘holiday’ series like the aforementioned games (or
Call of Duty, if your preferred
sport is hunting man).
But in the way that most people can’t play sports at a professional level,
neither can they simply get on a board and do a kick flip. Video games
have always made it easier to become a virtual expert at a real life
activity, but compared to the other sports titles mentioned,
Tony Haw’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 is…hard. In this respect, it perfectly
encapsulates the difficulty and frustration of actually learning
skateboard tricks in real life (minus the broken wrists).
Since the nineteen eighties video games have by and large only gotten
easier, but in the initial movement away from designing games for arcades
(where the point was to have the player die quickly so they throw in
another quarter) and instead focus on consoles, these changes were slow to
come by. As different generations gave us the Nintendo Entertainment
System, Sega Genesis and Sony PlayStation over the years with improved
graphics and gameplay, there were still parts of seemingly fun-for-all
titles that could be downright difficult and unfair (thinking your
Mega Mans, your
Super Goblins and Ghouls and of
course the proto-Dark Souls, King’s
Field).
Even when there were options, it would boil down to choosing between
‘easy’ (hard) or ‘hard’ (impossible). In action adventure games this meant
the enemies would have a lot more health and do a lot more damage, and in
sports games, it meant your opponent was just much, much better at
whatever you were playing…since they were, y’know, an early form of AI.
Sports games were some of the first video games (y’know, ‘cause they were
‘games’), and while Pong (that
is, table tennis on your tv) is the best known, there were also boxing and
racing games galore. Some had you aim for the fastest time, some were for
the highest score, if you could mash the buttons in just the right way to
land a key punch (in the sensibly titled
Punch-Out)
or well-timed boost (like in
Excite-Bike way back in 1984, which was a huge early critical and
commercial success designed and directed by…wait for it…Shigeru Miyamoto).
As the bytes slowly went from kilos and megas, better graphics and more
options for things to happen when you pressed buttons in a particular way
(hold down, press repeatedly, tap two at the same time) became available.
But it took the historic 2D to 3D jump for everything to be more realistic
(even if the polygon counts for every sprite and graphic were still damn
low) and immersive because, hey, we live in a 3D space (plus 1D of time).
The more games were like how we moved around, the more we could make the
impossible seem possible, like everyone becoming a pro at couch-based
skateboarding.
While ‘going fast’ might mean that the
Pro Skater series has more in common with racing games on the
surface (whether the realism of Gran
Turismo or psychedelic silliness of Mario Kart), the challenge of
button inputs and entering them at the right time to properly execute a
combo in a half pipe or off a jump makes it a bit more like a fighting
game.
Whether trying a kick-flip or a front foot impossible, positioning
yourself and your skateboard in just the right spot to land it is not
easy, and crashing sends your
energy meter down to zero and eats up valuable time.
Yes, time. 2 minutes seems like a cruelly short amount of it when the goal
is to have fun in a skateboard park or empty cityscape no matter what
you’re doing. But it becomes even harder when you have to collect hovering
letters (the magic word is ‘SKATE’) and cassette tapes (remember those?)
and nail combo after combo to get the sick score (50,000?!), especially
after they throw in a guy driving around in golf cart trying to mow you
down while screaming punk-inspired non-sequiturs (they change it to a guy
in a taxi for the New York City layout because of course).
Despite the re-mastered versions of
Pro Skater 1 + 2 coming out in 2020, it is still not always clear what
buttons you have to exactly press to accomplish a 900, sending you and
your popped kneecaps to an online guide.
Even when you get the basics down, there is a strong temptation to button
mash, especially when it worked that one time and you’ll spend plenty of
runs trying the exact same thing at the exactly same moment as you go off
a ramp but with little success.
Griping about difficulty may elicit eye rolls from developers, who will
quickly point out that they stuffed the game with plenty of different
modes of play and easily changed settings to make
Pro Skater 1 + 2 accessible to
all skill levels.
Difficulty and video game critics don’t always line up perfectly. Gamers
who can zero-death-run Dark Souls
might not be able to write a coherent paragraph on what makes it so
challenging, and a writer who can make any topic sound interesting might
not be able to shoot enough baddies to reach a mid-game checkpoint in
Uncharted.
Most forms of culture and entertainment have a long history of criticism
and analysis for many students and scholars to learn about and adhere to
(or thumb their nose at) when talking about a painting, a poem or a movie.
Video games do not.
These traditional examples of cultural content just require all interested
parties to just stare at it, listen to it, or read it to be able to take
it in and reflect upon the material. ‘Getting it’ in terms of what the
piece is trying to say is subjective, based not only on the viewer’s
personal life experience but their association with that form of culture
as a whole (the more movies you watch, the better you can appreciate what
works in them and what doesn’t).
But video games require critics to be good at not just typing with their
fingers to write about the title in question, but at manipulating a
controller, keyboard or glove to continually interact with the game,
because… that’s what playing a game is. The lexicon for
video game reviews and analysis has of course made leaps and bounds in the
last several years in terms of critical analysis (ah, ludonarrative
dissonance!), but video game reviewers of the late nineties and early two
thousands (when Pro Skater 2 was
first released) were not getting the same sort of attention as they are
today, in part because the video game industry is so much larger than
twenty years ago. While the internet was obviously already becoming a
dominant force, the monthly magazine cycle of EGM, GamePro and Nintendo
Power meant people weren’t expecting an onslaught of day-of-release
reviews and commentary. While the video
game industry has only grown and embraced the internet in a myriad of
ways, the overall journalism industry has crashed spectacularly thanks to
the internet (classified and retail ads were dependent revenue sources
that vanished), and video game journalism is teetering between these two
realms. Today immediacy in
reporting and reviewing is seen as essential. You cannot afford to avoid
participating in the latest/constant discussion of the news a week after a
game has released. Sure, if
it’s a big triple-A game that is getting great reviews and is selling like
hotcakes it’ll be trending for longer than most titles, but you would
still need to have some sort of ‘first impressions’ take to keep the eyes
and clicks fresh.
On top of this, retaining access to get future review copies of games
before the general public means staying in the good graces of gaming
companies.
This doesn’t necessarily mean the reviews of games have to be
complimentary, but it means the editors will have to (re)consider
publishing stories that expose these companies to the type of bad
publicity (because there certainly is such a thing) that might ultimately
affect sales and investment opportunities.
So there can always be a bit of a chin scratch when the opinions found
within reviews don’t seem to match the number given at its end or your own
experience with the game in question.
Fortunately, aggregates are here to save/damn us all.
While there can be plenty of criticisms levied against numerical ratings,
it can be a lot more nuanced and specific when compare to just good or
bad. Roger Ebert himself came to detest the absolute starkness of good
versus bad duality he became famous for: thumbs up and thumbs down.
Rotten Tomatoes is the most popular site, combining how approved critics
(a label that comes with its own baggage/challenges*) thought of a movie
(or tv series nowadays) into one easily understandable percentage.
*What does it take to become a professionally recognized critic? A
professionally recognized platform. In the past it meant newspapers and
other forms of print journalism, soon expanding to television (and
typically those that appeared on screen cut their teeth first with
newspapers and magazines), but with certain page counts/clicks on popular
movie news/reviews sites that might just be one person, its become easier
than ever to disagree with the critics because it’s
truer than ever that everyone’s
one of them.
But that percentage is actually hiding something. If a movie brags that it
has a 97% fresh rating on the site, it doesn’t mean that on average all
critics are giving it a 97%. It means that 97% of critics are simply
giving the movie a positive rating (which could still be 3 out of 5).
As always, let the buyer beware.
The similar website Meta-Critic compiles reviews many different forms of
culture and entertainment, and is the best known one for quickly figuring
what a bunch of critics and a bunch of fans think about a new video game.
Even the name of the site suggests that it is above the opinion of any one
person, and beside the number that averages out all the critics’ ratings
is the rating of the audience, which is susceptible to review bombing
(both good and bad). These two separate ratings lead to another divide
between the critic and the audience, with both sides being suspicious of
the intentions and abilities of the other. If you agree with the experts,
maybe they ain’t so bad, but if they like a game you hate (or vice versa)
then you might think they’re a punch of paid-off hacks. And critics who
are paid to review video games as a living can look at the audience rating
and see a bunch of unenlightened rubes who just want another
CoD game.
All this is to say that while the original
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 has a 98 score on Metacritic by the
critics, it has a 74 by everyone else.
So is it one of the greatest video games of all time, one of the greatest
sports games of all time, one of the greatest skateboarding video games of
all time, or is it just – to use that tired, cheap, argument-ending term -
overrated?
These qualifiers are certainly helpful, for reader/potential player
clarity and critic reputation alike.
Sports games are easy to dismiss and pigeonhole, especially as the genre
is dominated with annual releases of Madden, NBA, and FIFA that have very
slight improvements over their predecessor. Sometimes there’s little for a
reviewer to simply write about.
How do you compare a fantasy adventure game where you have magical attacks
and can travel through time to a sports game where you skateboard in
essentially real life locations in California?
Back to the helpful Roger Elbert: He noted that when he awarded stars to
various movies, he does not necessarily give them on a cumulative scale.
When he gives three out of four stars to
Hellboy II, it is not meant to
suggest it is just one star off from being up there with
Citizen Kane or
The Godfather as the all time
greats, but compared to similar movies of that genre and time (other comic
book flicks from around 2008).
But at least those are all movies.
Comparing different genres of video games can be much more complicated.
Yes, there might be quite the gulf between Ingmar Bergman’s
Persona and Spy Kids 3D but both
just require you to sit there and let your eyeballs take it in. Video
games, on the other hand, require your hands and your brain working in
tandem.
Maybe you have to figure out the best way to slaughter a gaggle of
monsters, maybe you have to rearrange falling blocks, maybe you have to
decide the best way to respond to someone who is dying of a mysterious
illness. That there are frequently elements of storytelling within the
game complicates matters entirely. And these tales can be as nuanced and
complex as a great television series or as simple as ‘go rescue the
princess in that castle’.
Even the way you play asks a lot. The ‘A’ button in one game might have
you jump, another game it might have you fire your weapon, and in yet
another it might be the one to talk to someone or open a door.
Juggling all this is something you take for granted the more games you
play, just as a cinephile gets used to various tropes and clichés the more
films they watch. And the more you play/watch, the more you can appreciate
when certain titles do certain things exceedingly well and become a
pleasure to experience.
It’s why Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2
has endured (and certainly why it was re-mastered twenty years after its
initially release), even if many gamers weren’t big into real-life
skateboarding or even virtual-life skateboarding. If there was one title
you were going to try, it quickly became universally agreed that this was
the one.
And hey, what both versions offer the player is undeniably fun, and the
wide array of challenges make you want to try achieving them over and over
again, because finally nailing down that elusive trick or scoring the
necessary 70,000 points in two minutes…really makes you feel like
Is it perfect?
Well no game is (not even Ocarina of
Time), since there is a level of repetition to this game even as you
unlock new maps that take you around the world…as long as your idea of the
world looks a lot like a skate park.
Fortunately there is one thing about
Pro Skater 2 that nobody can deny and makes it worth playing no matter
who you are or your video game skill level:
The soundtrack kicks major ass.
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"Did you have fun? Then you won."
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