Friday, April 11, 2008

Things Gamers Need to Get Over: Movies

There are movies, and they are the dominant narrative art form of our age. Last night I was at a bar with a friend, and the friend's friend showed up, stoned, wearing one of those German Army jackets that say "I consider marijuana use a way of life", and with a bushy whaler-beard that said "I have no fucking idea how ridiculous I look".



And this gentleman, as a musician (see above) and general dick, was passionately of the opinion that cinema is not the dominant narrative art form of our age. This only served to cement my conviction that anyone who says movies are not the dominant narrative art form of our age is a dick with a dumb neck-beard.

When the fellow on the street - possibly not you or I, because we read Umberto Eco in coffee-houses without a sense of irony, but you know, the common, backbone-of-all-that-we-hold-dear salt-of-the-urban-earth fellow who doesn't see why it's necessary to hold a position on Dan Brown in order to function conversationally in modern society - when he wants to pay a book a compliment, he will say, "It had the cracking pace of a really well-made movie".

When Average Person - not you or I, of course, who can say "I like to listen to Fuck Buttons" with a straight face, but Average Fellow, who likes U2 and liked Oasis when they were big and has no problem with the continued professional existence of Jack Johnson - when he hears something he likes, consciously or unconsciously he very often likes it because it has a cinematic quality to it, a certain depth or grandeur or narrative cohesion such as might be found in a good picture. When Kiss wanted to do something really artistic and pompous and alienating toward their fanbase, what did they do? Release an album they described as "the soundtrack for a movie that hasn't been made yet". Aware of history as far back as Bush 1, Trent Reznor did the exact same thing and described it in exactly the same way a year or so back, but this did better because it turns out Nine Inch Nails fans are marginally less discerning than people who like "Lick it Up".

But nobody takes this pedestal-elevating as far as gamers. The games industry has decided that all gamers really want is games that feel like movies. Lazily-written advertising copy for videogames uses the word "cinematic" more often than movies do. What this means is that the game will feature stupid camera tricks of the kind that, when making atrocious 2-hour cutscene Beowulf, Robert Zemeckis would've discarded as too ostentatious. Games that say they're cinematic aren't wrong, but they're cinematic in the same completely correct sense of the word that Bad Boys 2 is cinematic. Which is to say, totally reactive, hopelessly vogue and dated as soon as they hit the streets, reveling in their lack of interesting use of the library of technique at their disposal, and not even doing at all well what it was they came here to do, which in the case of games is to be fun to play.

Discerning gamers are not sucked in by this. "Discerning", in this case, refers to maybe 10%, at an optimistic estimate, of the total gaming population. Of that 10%, most have got far enough to realise that movies are movies and games are games; they will then proceed to use every debate about the state of the art as an opportunity to launch into a comparison of How Movies Did It with How Games Are Doing It. They will only make very simple comparisons, and they will, if at all possible, bring it back to some cockamamie statistic about how games make more money than movies (so does petrol, that doesn't make it the dominant cultural purveyor of our time).

Basically insecure, gamers of this ilk had a fucking spaz when Roger Ebert expressed his personal and well-informed opinion that games would never be art. How dare he!? What would an old man in a sweater know about art? How could someone who had devoted his life to understanding and elucidating the possible definition of "good cultural product" know more than someone who had finished Halo 3?

If gamers would get over this insecurity, they could admit that movies are a much more mature art form than games, which is natural as they have almost a hundred years head start. They could admit that movies say more interesting things than games, and that it'll be a long time before a game comes along that can stay with you in the same way as Se7en or Collateral or City of God. (Hopefully they'll not even bother trying to bring up games that ape the style of the above - Silent Hill, Grand Theft Auto, Burnout Paradise - but because gamers are largely fairly unworldly teenage boys, they will). But then again, that no movie can have viewers staying up till the wee hours trying to beat someone's time on Mario Circuit 1.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Things Gamers Need To Get Over: Uwe Boll

Uwe Boll is a man who makes movies based on video games. These movies are invariably based on second-tier video games that nobody really cares about, such as Dungeon Seige or House of the Dead. For fuck's sake, Uwe Boll made a movie based on Bloodrayne, which was basically Turok multiplied by ass in the Games Everyone Inexplicably Gives A Fuck About Before Release Then When They Come Out And Suck Nobody Cares stakes. The games Uwe Boll makes movies of do not have very good stories, and/or the stories aren't the focus of the games, and/or the makers were such doofuses that they made the cutscenes unskippable but this rightly just meant nobody played them rather than everyone watched the cutscenes.

The movies Uwe Boll makes are, invariably, not very good. Nobody working at Video-matic towers here in sunny New Zealand has seen a Uwe Boll movie, but they never get very good press and they always go DTV here and they're full of d-list actors; also if Uwe Boll was any good at making movies, he'd have graduated to something where the story was the main focus by now, instead of continuing to make movies where the primary selling point is "man with axe kills trolls" or "cat used as silencer" or "tits".

Nerds all have a huge hate on for Uwe Boll because (as far as I can tell) he is alone in making their hobby seem less respectable. When a mediocre man makes a mediocre movie from mediocre source material, the usual response is to say, "does anyone want to watch No Country for Old Men instead?"; but when a mediocre man makes a mediocre movie from mediocre source material that has an option screen, nerds suddenly decide that (a) they really gave a fuck whether the video game of House of the Dead would accurately document the struggles of Thomas and "G" against the evil of Dr Curien; and (2) they are sure that given this patchy-at-best subject material, any filmmaker working today (possibly including themselves) would have done a fine job, but Uwe Boll has fucked it all up against all odds and made a bad movie.

This hatred for mediocre filmmaker Uwe Boll manifests itself in nerds making lame references whenever any videogame movie has been announced. If it is by Uwe Boll, the nerds will clamber from their nerd-holes to list all the good things about the game that Uwe Boll will be ruining (paying no attention to whether these are things that could ever conceivably work in a movie, a distinction about which nerds know nothing); if it is not by Uwe Boll, the nerds will make snide references to Uwe Boll's lack of talent, safe in the knowledge that the movie will be joining the hallowed ranks of Mortal Kombat Annihilation, Street Fighter, Super Mario Brothers, Wing Commander, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and Doom.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Video picks of the week

Not updated every week.

It may not be the best topic in the world but be like me, trust in the in-house creative team of Gametrailers.com, they can make just about anything interesting. March 15 saw the start of...

6389-gametop_starwarsretro

For almost two years now, starting with a six part look at Zelda, Gametrailers have been making awesome Retrospective-multi-part epics and this one is no exception: according to the trailer the Star Wars Retro' will finally rank in with 10 parts. Now I think I could do this in one episode; after you've talked about The Super Star Wars games Shadows of the Empire, Dark Forces, and the Rogue ... Factor 5 games really what else is there? I was a little to young to be impressed by Vector Graphics. I wasn't blown away by Battlezone when I first played it, and so I never I really got into Star Wars' impact on the Arcade scene. I played and loved some of Star Wars Arcade's spiritual successors, the Starfox games are the only example I can think of right now, so I should like it but it's hard to put this properly other than to say the Wireframe style does weird things to my head. My eyes fucking hurt, and normally I don't equate that with having fun.


Now that I think about it, other than Shadows of the Empire and Rogue Leader I can't remember actually ever enjoying a Star Wars game. The key here is that the two games I've mentioned here are off-shoots/spin-offs from the main Star Wars plot, so therefore they aren't strictly movie adaptations, which as a rule generally suck ass.


I said at the beginning that it's a weird choice for a topic but really it's just offbeat enough to make sense. After excellent Metroid and Zelda series' I was for a time pushing the GT forums for a take on the Mario mythos but I've realised after further thought that as interesting as some aspects would undoubtedly be, I don't really need to hear about Nintendo's real-life landlord Mario or the American downfall of Radar Scope ever again.


http://au.movies.ign.com/dor/articles/863515/legend-of-zelda-movie-trailer/videos/legendofzelda_filmtrailer_040108.html;jsessionid=1dints35ts48t


This is one of the greatest April Fool's pranks this year, probably not the greatest game-related one (WOW: BARD LOL CHOCOLATE RAIN ROFL) but definitely one of the best thought out and from the looks of it one of the most expensive pranks of all the bunch. I wasn't for a moment sucked in but if the world flipped out and everything announced on April 1st was true I'd buy a Vintage edition Xbox 360, play Lego Halo on it all the live long day, and then when I got bored of that I'd fucking go to this movie! That Gohma and those spiky things in the desert kicked ass! My advice, don't watch the trailer multiple times. Subsequent viewings with an analytical mind make the trailer's production faults really easy to pick: the "video" quality footage in Hyrule Castle town, the ridiculously poor light level in most of the shots, the lack of an independent Musical score or any actual film industry talent (be it actors or otherwise) etc etc. Imagine what might of been, and then leave it at that.

I couldn't place the spark of familiarity I had with April Fools/Zelda until my bro Joe bought up this what some dudes did last year:


I forgot how good that was! That concept art is actually very impressive. I love the whole "hardc0re gamerz" tone of the video. You get the feeling the Podcaster's chatting about it after the trailer is shown are saying "it's good to see Zelda done right! I can't wait to get up in there Gears of War styles."


I found this kid today in my most recent search for Youtube awesome guitar techniques: http://www.youtube.com/user/ZackKim



Now speaking as someone who has had a passing affiliation with the Guitar over the years: despite what the Youtube comments may say, that shit is nothing like playing the piano.


- Danny