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List #2: Serious Science Fiction (Films and TV)

Continuing the series begun with my dumb list of game movies, we take a very incomplete look at real attempts to do something speculative and interesting with film and TV. The idea was that, in addition to voting the entries up and down, people would add their own thoughts. This happened, a bit. Not much. Here we go alphabetically, again — which as before is not necessarily the order in which I wrote the material.

Most sci-fi just tries to entertain with some familiar archetypes — space ships, lasers, weird alien life forms. Some sci-fi uses the archetypes as a thin veneer over familiar drama that could be staged anywhere.

Real sci-fi does one of two things. Either it pushes a scientific concept to its logical extreme, to study the effects of that idea on everyday life, or it uses a scientifically plausible scenario to push cultural concepts to their logical extremes in order to comment on contemporary life.

Either way, hard science fiction uses a rational understanding of the universe to explore the irrational way that we interact with the world.

2001: A Space Odyssey

The first half is perhaps the only movie to attempt a completely accurate portrayal of space, and space travel. Even further, Clarke and Kubrick tried to envision a world in which space travel (of this plausible sort) was an everyday occurrence, scattered with familiar brands and services. This is literary sci-fi, on a screen. There’s no real debate.

Blade Runner – The Final Cut

What if androids became so sophisticated that there was no sure way to tell them apart from real people? And what if those androids were wholly owned by corporations — and only produced in the first place as a disposable labor force? What if corporations ran all government and police matters? What would all of this mean for the value of life?

Children of Men

For about 20 years, the human race has been infertile. This has caused gradual problems to the social infrastructure, such that the UK is one of the only organized societies left — that organization retained by force. A few people claim to have a cure to that infertility, but such a cure goes against the established organization. Also, any baby who, against the odds, happens to be born is an immediate treasure and contraband for scientists the world over. Children of Men is a very nuanced and thorough exploration of that central “what if” that drives all serious science fiction.

Contact

Carl Sagan worked on this film for about twenty years before it went before the cameras, and then died just before it happened. Somewhere in the middle he shrugged and compiled his materials into a lovely novel, about a female scientist who finds herself in the middle of a possible first contact situation. Her work is her life, and she puts all her faith in her empirical skills. As chaotic as the universe seems, ultimately it all makes sense if you pay enough attention and are rigorous enough in your methodology. Then she is presented with a completely inscrutable situation, where all she has to go on is her own subjective impressions. The movie is also good, though it boils the book’s themes down a bit much and weighs spirituality higher than it needs to be.

Gattaca

So what happens when designer babies become the norm, and everyone with money or connections is sure to weed out all but the “best” genetic traits in the next generation? You get a society split between the genetically predictable and the genetically random — the products of natural births. Although it’s illegal to discriminate, it’s also simple to test. And no halfway decent employer is going to want to rely on unpredictable elements. You can see where things go from here, and write the movie on your own. Not exactly the most subtle allegory, but a worthwhile effort.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Every day you wake up, and someone else seems a little… off. They look the same, they have all the same memories, but everything human about them seems to have vanished. There’s a science fiction explanation, but really this is a discussion about the isolation of modern post-industrial, urban and suburban life.

Both the 1978 and the 1956 versions of this film are excellent in their own ways. The remake is actually closer to the original vision of the 1956 film, previous to studio interference, and has an extra layer or two of social satire about the self-oriented change in American culture over the 1970s.

Moon

Sam Rockwell is (so far as he knows) the only custodian of a corporate Moon base. For three years, his only companion has been a dubious AI voiced by Kevin Spacey. Then Rockwell’s character gets into a major accident. When he wakes, everything is just a little off. And when he starts to pick at the corners, his whole worldview shifts by one leap after another.

This is neat stuff. It could practically be a stage play, if you ignore the detailed and plausible depiction of Moon life. Moon takes cues from earlier serious sci-fi films like 2001 and Solaris, then ambles off in its own direction to explore the rights of the individual and the meaning of life in a world where corporations dictate policy and own everything down to individual DNA.

The Outer Limits (1963)

As with any anthology series, the quality and focus of the show depends on the writer. As often as not, though, The Outer Limits serves as a menagerie of fairly erudite short-form speculative fiction. Each episode could well be a short story in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. What we lose in deep exploration of a premise, we gain in a shotgun of odd juxtapositions, observations, and half-formed ideas. The best episodes could easily be expanded into an intense, thoughtful two-hour feature. The worst, well — they’re over in 25 minutes.

Quatermass and the Pit

In one breath, Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass is both trashy pulp and highbrow science fiction. In the US, his work is practically unknown; in the UK it’s as much part of the cultural DNA as, say, The Twilight Zone.

Over 26 years, Kneale wrote four TV serials. Three were adapted into slightly trashy yet much more watchable feature films. Of those, the third movie — Quatermass and the Pit — is probably the best Quatermass you’ll get, and also the most widely available. So that’s fortuitous.

While digging a subway line, engineers unearth the remains of an ancient space ship. All who contact the remains of its inhabitants start to behave oddly. The movie proposes various theories about the development of man and the significance of our subconscious impulses.

Solaris

This list should really include Tarkovsky’s 1972 original, but Soderbergh’s remake is worthwhile in its absence.

A station orbiting a distant planet has a strange effect on its personnel; they are constantly barraged with a warped sense of reality, built out of projections of their own memories. As it turns out, these projections are the attempts of an alien life form to communicate with the crew.

Adapted from the novel by Stanislaw Lem, Solaris uses the material of space travel to delve into the human psyche and explore both our means of communication and our subjective concept of reality.

Soylent Green

A pretty good movie that is diminished a bit by its legacy. You watch this, you’re going to be waiting impatiently for that famous line — which turns out to be one of the last lines in an unusually long film. So there’s a bit of an anticlimax, if that’s how you come at it.

Whereas in Children of Men our waning resource is fertility, here it’s food production. You see, there has been a population explosion. Exactly the opposite problem. And it’s not that food is unavailable; it’s that whatever food is available is heavily controlled. Furthermore, you don’t want to know where they’re getting the raw materials.

Sunshine

Another near-future story in the vein of 2001, Danny Boyle’s astronauts drift in the opposite direction to Kubrick’s, toward the center of the solar system. For whatever reason, the Sun is dying. We have a fission device that may reignite the star, but only enough material on Earth to build two. The first got lost somewhere along the way, and now the backup team is all we’ve got. Along the way the second team finds the hulk of the first vessel, and goes to explore it. Not the best idea ever.

Sunshine does a good job at depicting space travel. Of particular note are sequences when crew members are forced to float through space unprotected. They survive, with heavy sunburn and decompression sickness; maybe they’ll need a couple of fingers amputated.

The story is interesting, too.

The Thing (1982)

Much more so than the 1951 Howard Hawks adaptation, John Carpenter’s film embodies the horror and paranoia of John Campbell’s novella. It’s basically your standard base under siege format, except crossed with a social and existential paranoia that you can apply to any number of real-world scenarios. Any person on the base could be the monster, including you. Beyond that, the imagination involved in the monster design is kind of extraordinary. It takes its memory not only of human anatomy but of every other life form, terrestrial or not, and adapts those features pragmatically to its current circumstances. Some very big picture thinking here.

(July 22nd, 2011 @ 8:29am)



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The History of A-J Games: Part Five

To catch up on the story to date, you can view the archive here.

Time passed. I conducted some experiments, learned a few things, and became more confident with the tools. I completed a few original games, and toyed with some tributes. When I stumbled into my next run of insertion games, I was more prepared. I had a better sense of what was and was not possible with RSD’s tools. I had a slightly better sense of design. Creatively and technically, I was in a place to be more ambitious.

It’s unclear where Gridline came from. I get the feeling that the title screen may have come before the game itself, so maybe it began with some experiments in Deluxe Paint. Maybe I was thinking of some other game, like the early Genesis puzzler Zoom! — at least stylistically. Structurally, ToeJam & Earl may have had some influence.

Alternatively, the background grid may have left over from Explorer Jacko. Perhaps the tiles were meant for a dungeon level that I never completed.

Whatever the game’s origin, it is perhaps the most original I had developed to this point. Whether it is successful is another question. For a while I was rather proud of it, though. Of my early insertion games, it is the only one that I considered “canonical” and included on lists of available software.

The character is again based on the familiar template. I believe I had recently come back in contact with a grade school associate who I had not seen in five years, and so meant to send him the game as a gift. His input was zilch and his presence had little to no effect on the game’s design. In this case I felt free to get as weird as I liked.

I decided that the grid setting was a sort of outer space purgatory, to which my associate had been spirited away for reasons unknown. The grid was full of mostly-original monsters who could turn a person to stone, and indeed littered with statues representing previous explorers. The idea, I think, was that every time the player died, the character would petrify on the spot — and then the next time around, the statue would remain on the field. That element never quite came together.

Something that sort of did work out was the combat. In place of the projectiles in my earlier games, here it’s all about close-quarters fighting. Furthermore, the attacks are mapped to four directionals for a sort of Robotron-style experience. Both the attacks and the mapping are a little wonky in the implementation, but compared to what I’d done before this is a pretty big stylistic leap.

Amongst the melee combat, the small environments, and the distinctive monsters — as well as the dire consequences of being touched — Gridline winds up feeling sort of conceptual. Whether it works or not, it’s small, focused, and distinctly odd. Little wonder it pleased me at the time.

Less pleasing were my next two projects, both of which felt altogether foisted on me. Someone sat me down, told me what do do, and watched while I did it. The results so embarrassed me that, despite later attempts to salvage the material, these games are amongst only three finished projects that I never released.

It is perhaps significant that both games use the same background tiles, most of which I borrowed from earlier projects which in turn borrowed most of their tiles from A-J’s Quest. There is an element of rapid prototyping, especially with someone watching over one’s shoulder, and there is an element of sheer apathy.

I think what most bothered me about these games is that the actual design was less a concern than their exhibition of my associates’ proclivities. Tony & Me, for instance, was meant to be a Double Dragon style brawler — not the most sensible option for the given tools, but I was willing to try — but what it was really about was its protagonist’s real-life ambitions to get laid. That, and to demonstrate what a tough dude he was.

I suppose I could have gone any direction with this game. Were I a little more clever I could have undermined the premise with some lampoonery, or used it as an opportunity to try some new techniques that would pan out in later projects. Instead, I just chose to get it over with.

I brought over the melee combat from Gridline, but in interest of simplifying the controls and out of sheer apathy I condensed the attacks down to one button. The results are underwhelming. The character will close his eyes, extend both arms, and then depending on which direction he had been walking, a fist or a weapon will appear at the end of one arm. When I write it out like that, the animation sounds more interesting than it is. In practice, it comes off as lazy. Which is accurate.

Likewise the enemies are borrowed wholesale from Gridline and A-J’s Quest, which confirms the game’s dating if my vague memory and extrapolation of the game’s mechanics weren’t enough.

One new element is the character sprites. I think by this point I was tired of rehashing the same template. It was too recognizable, it was too limited, and it just wasn’t original. Also, I may have chosen to demonstrate to my associate the character design process. If that was the case, then I can understand why I may have begun from scratch — especially as by this point I felt I had a grasp of basic animation.

Of note is that my associate insisted that I include myself as a playable character — inspired, perhaps, by the variety in Final Fight or Streets of Rage. My implementation was, for whatever reason, to position the player as a ghost or angel who has the opportunity to be revived as either of the two characters — complete with voiceover about his predicament.

Since the engine only supports one player at a time, and since there is no practical difference between the characters, the effect of the choice is somewhat diminished. I chose to distinguish the two threads by swapping out the monsters (he gets Gridline; I get A-J’s Quest) and by changing the ending. Play as him, you get a happy ending. Play as me — well, you just play a level and then stop.

Later on I removed the parts that made me feel icky, changed around the identities of involved parties (both he and the particular girl he had in mind), and adjusted the mechanics enough to allow the game to sort of stand alone. None of it helped, though, and the game sat on my hard drive for a decade and a half.

Mind you, it had company. If Tony & Me was embarrassing, my next game was probably one of the more horrible things I’ve done.

There’s sort of a long story here. You know when you’re little, and your parents match you with other kids your age, and somehow they’re your friends, whether you actually like them or not? That was never more the case than with this client. Let’s call him Mark. My, he was a pushy one. Mark had a grudge against another fellow in our grade, we’ll say Harold. I never quite understood why.

As I say, I had no problem with Harold, but being young and conflict avoidant, I tended to just go along with Mark’s nonsense until Mark went away. One day Mark invited himself over and decided that I needed to make a game in which he killed Harold. I think I ignored him at first, but Mark had a way of digging in his heels and I had a way of folding.

The idea was that Mark would catch Harold in various lewd acts, at which point Mark would slowly blast Harold to pieces. I’m going to spare you the details, but it got unpleasant. Mark wanted to be portrayed as basically a Harold-slaying machine. He also wanted a sort of 3D, behind-the-back perspective reminiscent of Dead Angle.

In the tradition of games like Street Fighter II, interspersed with the normal levels were various bonus stages. In one stage Mark attacked Harold’s house and killed his mother. In another he simply chased Harold through a town and field, throwing sharp objects at him. In portraying Mark, I drew roughly from my memories of the arcade version of Sega’s E-SWAT, a sort of Japanese response to Robocop. Mark certainly liked his Robocop.

Which is not to say that I put any effort into the project. In fact I borrowed nearly all the game’s resources from Tony & Me, a project that received little enough attention. I think every step of the process I was simultaneously dragging my heels and looking for ways to avoid thinking about what I was doing.

Ultimately I filed Operation Killbot way in the back of my directory structure, unwilling to throw anything away but unsure what to do with the game. Eventually, as with Tony & Me, I made some effort to clean the game up. I removed some of the more uncomfortable imagery, changed around the premise and identities, and tried to tidy the mechanics.

That last part was the most damning, though, and explains why, even after several passes at fumigation, I never released the game. It simply doesn’t work, on any level. Mark’s requests were impossible within the framework I was using, but I didn’t care. I was only concerned with shutting him up and getting him out the door. Granted, in retrospect you can take Killbot as a curious experiment. It comes off as a sort of shooting gallery game, like a poorly designed Hogan’s Alley or Chiller without the light gun.

Maybe with extensive revision I could have salvaged the basic format. The level that works the best is the first bonus stage, where the player attacks the house. This is not to suggest that the level actually works, but the variety of targets — some stationary, some moving — does suggest a better direction for design.

It seems that even in the worst failures one can find, if not salvation, some glimmers of inspiration. This is a reassuring thought, as we have yet to hit the bottom of the well.

The story continues in Part Six…

(July 21st, 2011 @ 9:09am)



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List #1: A Ranking of Videogame Movies

A while back I had a gig producing content for a social network that later took an unfortunate turn. Before all of this stuff disappears, I’m going to repost as much of that writing as I can.

We begin with a kind of stupid entry, dealing with videogames adapted into feature films. The idea is that people would vote these items up and down, producing a sort of ranked list. As it turns out, I drew up this list at about the same time as the list feature stopped to work and the site ceased to promote it — so not a single person voted. Oh well! Here it is in semi-alphabetical order.

Adapting a game to cinema is never an easy task. Videogames and film are different kinds of art, that serve to explore different things in different ways. Videogames are all about banging your head against the rules of the environment to get a sense of how a world works. Film is all about telling a story using a stream of imagery over time. In film, there is no way to actively explore rules and in videogames a story generally exists at best to lend context to what the player is doing.

So, most game-to-film adaptations stink. It is up to you, dear readers, to vote up the best of the bunch and to vote down the worst. Some of these are probably worth seeing! We’ll find out which, presently.

Alone in the Dark

This series has had a bad time of it lately. The first three games were groundbreaking; Shinji Mikami substantially cloned the games in creating his Resident Evil series. Then the properties started to shift hands. Whenever a new up-and-coming studio wants to try a few cool techniques, they seem to buy into the Alone in the Dark license. The results are always interesting on an experimental level but somewhere between horrible and disappointing when it comes to actual game design. The concept has also strayed pretty far from the original games. Our friend Uwe Boll seized on the property for cheap, as people tend to, and spat this out. He managed to nab Christian Slater as Edward Carnby. This was before Boll’s reputation became public knowledge.

Bloodrayne

The second of many Uwe Boll films to clutter this list. Uwe Boll is a strange character; a charlatan who deliberately makes the quickest, worst movies possible so that he can cash in on Germany’s national film funding and various forms of insurance. It’s like he saw Mel Brooks’ The Producers as a set of step-by-step instructions.

The Bloodrayne games were exploitative trash following in the wake of Tomb Raider; they only really existed to cash in on the existing development climate. So, hey. Uwe Boll comes up to you with a small wad of cash, you take it. Result: another Uwe Boll movie.

DOA: Dead or Alive

The games started off as hacks of Virtua Fighter that added ridiculous breast physics and somewhat more visceral back-and-forth combat. They later developed into a consciously exploitative and yet still technically respectable series that can just about get away with its T&A action on the basis of its solid game design. Aside from the boobs there’s still little reason to play the games over any other first-tier 3D fighter, but whatever.

What I wonder is why so, so many game movies are based on games from such inappropriate genres. How many fighting games do we have on this list? Granted, the DOA characters do have convoluted backgrounds — but really, is there a story here?

Doom

Andrzej Bartkowiak was cinematographer on plenty of respectable films, from Falling Down to Speed to U.S. Marshals. As a director… hmm.

Well, it’s got Eomer from Lord of the Rings in it. And Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

Later, the same dude would go on to direct Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li. Some career he’s building up, here.

Double Dragon

Man, remember when these games were big? Technos took the gaming world by storm, first by creating the first versus fighter (Karate Champ), then by creating the first side-scrolling brawler (Renegade), then by refining the latter model into a two-player masterpiece full of advanced moves, interactive and varied terrain, weapons that you can pick up and carry, distinctive enemies, and some of the rockingest theme music ever. The story was simple: Billy Lee’s girlfriend gets kidnapped by street punks, so he and his brother Jimmy set out to rescue her with their fists. The movie… it’s something about a magical medallion that gives a couple of middle-class kids the power to beat up mutants. Not sure where this came from.

Far Cry

I didn’t even know that this movie existed. The games are technically very advanced and ambitious first-person shooters that mostly take place in natural environments and have very stiff, stilted-feeling design. Uwe Boll apparently leapt in and grabbed the film rights before the game was even released. Joke’s on him; the series has actually become pretty successful. But conversely, Joke’s on Crytek and Ubisoft, because — well, Uwe Boll.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

This movie nearly bankrupted Square, and put founder and FF series director Hironobu Sakaguchi in the doghouse, leading the way to his departure from Square soon thereafter.

See, as great as Final Fantasy VII was in many other respects, the thing that everyone talked about at the time was its pre-rendered CG cutscenes. For the next game, Sakaguchi decided to play to the crowd and made the cutscenes practically the whole point. From there, the logical next step was to just remove the game part completely. Thus, we have this weirdly neutered film. In place of the wacky fantasy of the original games, we have a clumsy and frankly boring sci-fi story calculated to appeal to American mainstream audiences — a goal undermined by the uncanny valley of mostly-realistic CG actors.

Hitman

Basically these are action games with minor adventure and large third-person shooter components. You play as a hitman who largely has to find his weapons in the field, often through offing people along the way. So there’s a strategic element and a stealth element, and they have that free-form sandbox thing that was so popular in the early noughts. The movie… well, Roger Ebert liked it: “Hitman stands right on the threshold between video games and art. On the wrong side of the threshold, but still, give it credit.”

House of the Dead

House of the Dead is based on Sega WOW’s arcade shooting gallery series, and features a cameo from Sega of America’s then-president. By all accounts it is one of the more confusing things devoted to film, explained by the involvement of Uwe Boll. By the time the movie was released (to universal scorn), he had moved on.

In the Name of the King

Have you ever played Dungeon Siege? It’s a generic hack-and-slash RPG based closely on the BioWare/Black Isle design popularized by games like Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights. Generic enough and unlikely enough to make perfect Uwe Boll fodder. Yes, this movie is somehow an adaptation of the game. By all accounts it comes off like a pathetic Lord of the Rings clone — which puts it on a level with most fantasy fiction of the last 50 years or so.

The King of Fighters

Of all the fighting games that you could turn into a movie, The King of Fighters perhaps makes the most sense. KOF is basically a serial martial arts drama that has been going on since 1994, with yearly updates up through KOF2003 and then occasional chapters in the years since. The series features dozens upon dozens of characters, each with complex backgrounds and intertwined stories. The games themselves trace all manner of alliance, betrayal, and epic goings-on. You could create a long-running Smallville-type TV series out of this material with little effort. And yet this movie borrows only loosely from the games, then makes little sense of its own. Who is this supposed to appeal to? Why bother?

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

The title says it all; by this point the game series had become a joke, and all that anyone remembered about it was its protagonist — who always looked uncannily like Angelina Jolie, so hey. There were two movies with Jolie, and as of early 2011 the series is now being “rebooted”. As with Silent Hill and Resident Evil, at least this movie more or less works cinematically, as a Mummy-level Indiana Jones knock-off.

Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life

Supposed to be a little better than the first movie. Roger Ebert actually got a kick out of this one.

Max Payne

Marky Mark stars as Remedy’s satirically gritty New York sourpuss. In the game, Max is an ex-cop seeking revenge while under tremendous physical and emotional pain — pain that leads him to hallucinations and that he tries to, well, remedy with medication. In the movie, he’s being chased by literal demons and monsters.

Okay.

The dude who directed the movie, John Moore, was also behind the 2006 remake of The Omen. The people who made the game, in a long tradition, have aired their grievances and distanced themselves from his work.

Mortal Kombat

The game is ridiculous trash, that cashed in on the success of Street Fighter by filling its sprite banks with bad photographs of bad actors posing badly. Its lasting impact on the industry is mostly the establishment of the ESRB rating board, the concept of finishing moves in fighting games and elsewhere, and an endless string of hidden characters such as Akuma/Gouki in the later Street Fighter games.

The movie realizes that the game is ridiculous, and builds on all the most memorably ridiculous parts to construct a joyously stupid yet technically proficient martial arts movie. In some ways, the movie gets across the spirit of the game better than the game ever did.

Postal

As with Ewe Boll’s other films, the Postal license must have come cheap. The movie came out in 2007; the original game — which also was exploitative trash masquerading as satire — was released a decade earlier. A sequel was released in 2003, that tried to cash in on the Grand Theft Auto/sandbox design mania, but by 2007 the games had pretty much faded from everyone’s thoughts. With good reason. All the better makings for a deliberate flop.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Donnie Darko plays an Arab in this adaptation of a remake of a remake of Jordan Mechner’s 1989 classic tale of bloody deaths, leaps of faith, and little brothers in pajamas. As with the Tomb Raider movies, it’s sort of trying to be the Brendan Fraser remake of The Mummy.

Resident Evil

Pure trash, plus Milla Jovovich. Still, it basically works as a movie — and worked well enough to span at least four sequels. It’s probably a good idea to focus on Jovovich’s original character rather than the game’s original protagonists.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse

The second RE movie, which introduces Jill Valentine and is largely based on the third game. Worth mentioning that writer Paul W.S. Anderson, aside from writing and producing all the films in this series, also directed the first and fourth RE films plus the first Mortal Kombat film; and produced DOA: Dead or Alive. The dude’s almost like a higher-rent Uwe Boll. Oh, he’s also married to Milla Jovovich; they met on the set of the first movie. So this is also a family franchise.

The movie was received much less well than the first one — which itself received mixed reviews at best.

Resident Evil: Extinction

Third movie in the series. Milla Jovovich continues in the lead role. Here the story branches away from the game series completely. Although we meet several familiar characters from Capcom’s games, the plot and setting are all new. If game game is influenced by anything, it’s probably Code Veronica, what with the addition of Claire and Wesker, and a few setpieces from the game.

Although critically panned, this one earned the studio a hell of a lot of money.

Resident Evil: Afterlife

Fourth movie in the series; now it’s in 3D and IMAX. Based loosely on RE5 — including the introduction, finally, of Chris Redfield. Again with the critical derision contrasted with box office success. Apparently it’s the “most successful production in Canadian feature film history.” It’s unclear if that’s in dollars or professional satisfaction.

Silent Hill

A pretty decent adaptation of a less than totally obvious game, clearly produced by people who loved them some Konami. The film is more or less an adaptation of the first game, with elements of the second, and most of the context removed. If Pyramid Head is the projection of James Sunderland’s subconscious violence toward women, why is he in the movie? Although Silent Hill has always had a sort of feminine quality to it, there’s a reason why the first game is about a hapless, and obviously kind of broke, single father rather than a happily married upper middle-class mother. Regardless, the movie works on its own terms up until the last fifteen minutes or so. Not sure what they were trying to accomplish there.

Street Fighter

The movie that killed Raul Julia. Why does it focus on Guile, when the game is all about Ryu and Ken? Because Guile is an American, and the film was made for Universal. So if Guile is American, why is he played by Jean-Claude Van Damme? Well…

Super Mario Bros.

Less an adaptation; more an acid trip experienced against a backdrop of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle films. There may be some kind of surreal brilliance in this tale of subterranean fungus and human-shaped dragons, if you take it strictly on its own logic and merits. As a representation of Miyamoto’s game, though, it’s more like that weird 1980s cover art that was often more disturbing than the actual game content.

Tekken

Another fighting game — albeit another one with deep, convoluted backstories for all its characters. Why adapt this instead of, say, Shenmue?

The guy behind the Tekken games, Katsuhiro Harada, wonders the same thing. “That Hollywood movie is terrible. We were not able to supervise that movie; it was a cruel contract. I’m not interested in that movie.”

Wing Commander

I’m not all that up on the Origin System games; from what I gather, they were huge because they were basically Star Wars games in all but name during that long period when Lucasarts avoided milking its film licenses and instead focused on games like Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island. The movie is a genial if somewhat generic sci-fi flick with that guy from Hackers. It’s totally watchable, if somewhat unrelated to the source material.

(July 20th, 2011 @ 1:03pm)



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Rover of the Deep

Out of the 38 games I produced in the 1990s, I only finished 30. (If you want to get technical, I finished 31 then unfinished one.) Of the eight unfinished games, four had an actual chance at completion. I had the whole game planned out, and most of the infrastructure in place; all I needed to do was build the levels.

One of those four is a Blaster Master tribute called Rōdïp: Rover of the Deep. It came out of a sort of competition with another Game-Maker user, to design the best Blaster Master pastiche. His game hewed very closely to the source material. I took the basic concept and a variation on the vehicle design, and I wandered.

The plan was for six main levels, five bosses, and four vehicle upgrades. I finished everything except the levels, the bosses, and some elements of the presentation. Then I got distracted, and the game sat on the shelf for 15 years.

A few months ago I dug it up again, and I realized that the game ain’t half bad. For a Game-Maker game it controls unusually well. The existing monsters and background tiles are distinctive and meticulously built. The existing levels were pretty good, if rough around the edges — and certainly unlike something I would design now.

So I tidied up the levels, making sure that platforms and monsters were placed sensibly, and then I began to design a new one. The slot was already there; I just had to fill it.

In the game’s structure, level 3 is the first new level after the player gains the hover upgrade, allowing much more free movement through the terrain. It made sense, then, to capitalize on that new element and create a free-flowing map, not so dependent on platforms as on environmental hazards and barriers.

There is a contrast, though. For all the player’s new freedom, in a way the new map should be more constrained than ever. One concern is to give the level a sense of structure. It means nothing if the player can go anywhere, if there is nowhere specific to go. So throw in some long vertical corridors, or awkwardly connected rooms, to underline the potential of the player’s new mobility.

The other concern is to give the player a challenge that offsets the new ability. You don’t want the game to get easier just because the player is more powerful. Sure, earlier sections become a cinch — but a new rule should change the game’s focus, and give the player something new to master just around the time the player starts to feel comfortable. So the new level should present new sorts of problems that can only be solved with the new concepts at play.

None of this was a big priority. I have articles to write, a life to attend to, skills to learn. I don’t need to spend too much time messing with old, abandoned projects. So maybe once a week I would spend an hour or so tinkering with the map, adding another screen or two. It has taken a few months. The other day I finished the level. And here it is:

The entrance is toward the lower middle; the boss door is toward the upper left.

It may not be the strongest level in the world; much of it was improvised, rather than planned out deliberately. Still, that improvisation was informed by certain principles and, I think, a pretty good sensibility. Which is to say, I rather like it.

I’m uncertain whether I ever will finish the game; it’s been a decade and a half, so there’s no rush. And now that I’ve finished this level, I think I may have satiated my interest for the moment. Further discouraging me is that, after all, this is a pastiche. If I could take the rover out of the game, and turn the project into something wholly original, then maybe I would feel less reluctant. And yet then, the game would lose much of its identity — so there’s no point.

Again, though, I think the game is pretty decent for what it is — even half-finished. You can play it here, if you like. Press F6 and select the appropriate slot to skip straight to level 3.

Alternatively, here‘s a level 3 playthrough on Youtube.

(July 10th, 2011 @ 12:11pm)



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A Most Gorgeous Dissemination

Just going to mention that I posted again about Builder over here.

That is all.

(July 5th, 2011 @ 5:03pm)



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