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Posted By Shaun K. about 11 months ago
Should this be the future of Assassin's Creed?
Welcome to the debut episode of Blistered Thumbs’ newest show, where we introduce the debate and you continue it.
Posted By Shaun K. about 11 months ago
Should this be the future of Assassin's Creed?
Welcome to the debut episode of Blistered Thumbs’ newest show, where we introduce the debate and you continue it.
What makes a game truly great? Join me as we look at some of the titles that changed the industry for good and ill. This is Game Changers.
The only video game to movie adaptation I’ve ever really really wanted is a Raidou Kuzonoha movie. It could either be in colour or black and white but I’d want it to be a silent film with subtitles when characters talked instead of like a traditional silent film cut away to screen of text. It’d be just a detective story in 1930s Japan starring Raidou Kuzunoha the XIV (or XV if you wanted to say XIV died a couple years back) with some high action and heavy reliance on score. It’d never happen not only is it a somewhat obscure ip it’d have to be a silent film to have any point and you just can’t sell that. But I can dream.
I do agree that half the battle is picking a good game to adapt to a movie. For example, Minecraft the movie would be stupid because the point of Minecraft is playing it. Assassin’s Creed might work, though.
Another problem is that Hollywood instantly wants a live action movie if it’s based on a video game. A prime example is the Super Mario Bros. Movie. If there were to be a Mario or Sonic movie, I would much rather prefer them to be animated movies. There’s Professor Layton’s OVA, as the vid mentioned. I remember somewhere that there was an Animal Crossing Anime OVA that at least looked interesting (only saw trailer tho).
Of course, I wouldn’t mind these games as live action: Bully, Grand Theft Auto (IV, preferably), the main questline of Oblivion, or Bioshock (the first one). I would also like to see a Mega Man anime movie, much like the trailer for Mega Man Online (*sigh*, curse capcom…).
A Portal movie would either be something along the lines of the movie, “Cube”…
Or, the story of how the new Portal Gun was created, GLaDOS’ creation and her killing everyone,
or probably the best idea, Set in the 1950′s about Cave Johnson’s rise and his creation of the original massive portal gun, then the terrible (unexplained) accident which forced him to close down the old plant.
Isn’t “Thumb Wars” already copyrighted?
I think part of the problem is that Hollywood currently does not take videogame adaptations seriously. Even if the game itself has a solid story, if the director or filmaker does not have the will to ease the transition from game to movie properly it would surely flop. So far I do not see a lot, if any, video game adaptations that work on film. It might even be worse if the original game is non-linear in nature, how the heck then do you actually make a movie when the charm of the game is the gamer making his own script?
The only film from a video game I would watch is Assassin’s Creed Lineage, and even that was made in-house by Ubisoft.
I believe the same thing, in many cases. Disrespect of source material
lead to most, if not all, of the problems with Silent Hill, the Resident Evil series, and every Uwe Boll film.
Some films, by their nature, are easier to adapt to film than others. Fighting games are by far the most adaptable; you have loads of relatively developed characters, a bunch of little plots to use, expand, or outright ignore, and often a major tournament to serve as the end goal AND the “you all meet at an inn” method of getting the cast to interact. Really, all you need to do between fights is have characters interact with each other. Stick Talim and Yoshimitsu in the same room and see what happens – and maybe that itself becomes a fight. Who knows?
Soul Calibur actually has a fairly decent plot to adapt, given that the games have been very narrative focused. The ending of Soul Blade can serve as the prologue, the Kilik-Xianghua-Maxi trio hunting Nightmare can serve as the main plot, and stuff like the Koreans seeking the “Sword of Salvation”, the machinations of the Fygul Cestemus cult, and so forth as the subplots. It’s all very workable, and given how the narrative of the games is very fragmented between individual stories and separate games, it allows for a cohesive story to be told without fear of redundancy.
If that’s the case, then why are almost all fighting game movies so bad?
Well
A. The original Mortal Kombat movie is AWESOME (And I don’t care how many people disagree with me on that) and so is the ANIMATED Street Fighter II film.
B. Most other fighting game to movie adaptations can hardly be called ‘legit’ attempts at making a decent film.
C. He has a point when he says setting up the stories to fighting games is easy. If a film director follows the template of Enter The Dragon and has some actual talent, they’re golden.
I never said anything about quality, just ease of adaptation.
On the actual subject, I love the original Mortal Kombat movie and the live-action Tekken is flawed but enjoyable (I will note, however, that I am not a Tekken fan, so altered details don’t bother me as much).
I do agree that some genres tend to lend themselves to adaptability a bit more easily. It frustrates me that, as it seems, the only games to get Western adaptations are some of the most plotless action games the industry and the art and the industry have to their name. And those that would otherwise have worked are completely bastardized by the producers and director…
On that note, I see your point about the viability of fighting games, but they are not my first thought when it comes to adaptability. It seems to me that adventure games, being directly descended from text adventures, in turn descended from interactive stories (which were merely prose fiction in digital form, plus a few puzzles and/or choices), are DIRECT DESCENDENTS of literature, and still display many of its plot and character conventions. Hell, many novels in the west and mangas and animes in the east are adapted into adventure games rather than films. That said, literature and film are more closely related, story-telling-wise, than film and [typical] game. I know that the time has passed, but I would like to see a family film made from Day of the Tentacle. Directed by Terry Gilliam…
Another genre with promising lineage would, of course, be RPGs, as they derive from early attempts at digital recreation of such tabletop games as D&D, in which players made a flowing narrative as they played (with significant contribution from characters involved). Said digital counterparts are not as malleable, but they have created magnificent worlds and strong, believable characters. On top of that, the console RPG was created with Dragon Quest, another attempt at putting literature into interactive form. Many console RPGs could make a decent film without much alteration. Computer RPGs might need to take some liberties, but the games tend to emphasize the simulationist aspect – the expansive environment, exploration, and discovery. Plenty of great movies, from Thief of Bagdad to Time Bandits, have hinged almostly completely on the settings (such stories are called “milieu” stories, and have a rather rich history).
So, yeah. There are obvious exceptions, but I just don’t think that most action games (at least not the ones being adapted) have as much promise.
I think we need a sonic and mario movie.
Videogames adaptability to film largely depends on the premise. The public might THINK it wants a portal movie for example, but the only way that could work would be adding more characters.
Those kind of decisions tend to polarise people depending on how they handle it, if you put more characters into the current story rather then in flashbacks you would more then likely piss off the fans, but if you do the opposite and have a ton of flashbacks you’d more then likely alienate all the newcomers.
In this case at least probably the only way to do a movie would be to either make a sequel to the story or prequel rather then something that runs alongside it…
and that’s one of the EASIER games to come up with a movie concept for… good luck trying to come up with a story for something that’s a blank slate… oh wait battleship… *headdesk*
Interesting. See, if you asked me, I would say that Portal would actually be one of the harder game properties to adapt into a film. I mean so much of what make that series special is tied into its gameplay as much as it is the story and characters. And its gameplay that would be ill suited for recreation on the big screen in my opinion. Sure, you could just show various portal antics but I think they would lose something in the translation, especially without the immediacy that comes from actually playing the game.
I picture it ending up becoming something akin to the infamous FPS sequence from the Doom movie. In theory, you can totally see why the filmmakers thought that filming a set piece around the idea of directly recreating the visual ticks and perspective of Doom’s gameplay could work. The problem was in practice (and especially without a stronger story and more compelling set of characters to go along with it) the idea just did not translate and instead of creating an exhilarating climax, the sequence felt hokey and forced.
It all returns to a point I made in the episode proper, about the difference in mediums and how what works for one does not always work for another. As you said, there is really no way of doing a direct adaptation of the Portal games without straying into redundancy and diminishing returns. I mean all you really have is GLADOS (and maybe Wheatley I suppose) and the game already does a bang up job bringing her character to life and telling her story. Heck, you could easily make the argument that the Portal games really are about her far more than they are about Chell.
Nor am I convinced that there is enough material to work with to make a Portal feature film not dealing with the story of the first two games realistically viable. I guess you could possibly do something with Cave Johnson, but for all that I would be 100% behind a Cave Johnson spin-off film (seriously, you just know J. K. Simmons could pull that off, live action or animated), it still would not really be a Portal movie at that point.
Now a Half-Life movie, especially one based on the second game… Well that could (emphasis on could) work. If for no other reason than that telling the stories of that series from a view point beyond just Gordon Freeman’s can work in a way that doing the equivalent for Chell and Portal would not. The various expansions for the original Half-Life are proof enough of that. Thanks for the great comment; you certainly left some interesting food for thought.
I’m not sure if I can add anything relevant to THE DISCUSSION, but I just gotta ask this:
Why the bloody hell did Jerry Bruckheimer look at the numbers for “Prince of Persia,” then throw up his hands and say, “Screw it, we’re just gonna do another Pirates movie!”???
Prince of Persia was a very cool flick with a story that had a few elements from the games yet had its own story that was well told within two hours. It had decent reviews and made decent bank. And yet plans for a sequel or two got axed.
Was it because of the “white-washing” controversy? Or did the movie fall short of some $5 billion projected income? Was the bar set too high? Is there no bloody hope for a sequel years after the fact? And lastly, I wonder if other filmmakers look at Prince of Persia and see only another blueprint for failure?
Well, this is a lot less creepy than what the title initially made me think of…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ06RKGcPBI
Thumb Wars is not creepy, its goddamned awesome.
Eh… thought so as a kid, but after rewatching it, it’s nowhere near as funny as I remember.