In this column we've learned a lot about the tremendous impact video games have had on Hollywood, but what about the gamers themselves? You see, we gamers know what we're actually like, but filmmakers are still a little unclear about how to portray our ilk. When they sit down at their typewriters, we usually come off as either more charming and interesting than we are in reality, or we're condescendingly insulted. Need proof? Here are the most egregious offenders in science fiction.

The Movie: Stay Alive (2006)
The Gamers: Incredibly hot and stupid
With a cast made up of startlingly good-looking actors like Sophia Bush, Milo Ventimiglia, and Samaire Armstrong, much of this sub-par movie feels like a feature-length Nintendo Wii commercial -- admittedly, one that's full of decapitations and slit throats. The characters in Stay Alive are indicative of everything gamers simultaneously loathe and envy; we Cheetos-eating, over-or-underweight lot wish to be the type of people who could swap spittle with Sophia Bush, but we also never want to be the kind of brainless morons who get killed because we weren't smart enough to stop playing a video game that decapitates its players. Decisions, decisions.

Continue reading "Don't Play Me Like That! The Worst Depictions of Gamers in SciFi" »

The other day I watched Resident Evil: Degeneration -- Japan's CG adaptation of the venerable game franchise -- and I realized that video game movies produced by Westerners tend to be more bombastic, more loose with the source material and, ultimately, less beloved than the ones produced by Eastern countries. "An interesting thought," you might say, "but you can't really compare the two filmmaking styles unless you find both Japanese and American adaptations of the same video game."

"Ho," I say, "I've found several that fit just such a category." Read on.

Super Mario Bros. (1993) vs. Super Mario Bros: Great Mission to Rescue Peach! (1986)
Though now admirable in a whimsical, quasi-ironic sort of way, the U.S.-produced Super Mario Bros. movie was nothing short of reviled when it hit theaters. The press hated it, fans of the game hated it -- heck, even the actors hated it. Blame the bare-bones plot -- "Bowser kidnapped the princess, get her back" -- that couldn't sustain itself, or the characters, whose cartoonish charm was immediately lost in the switch to live-action. Blame Bob Hoskins, who, fantastic as he was, just couldn't balance out the presence of John Leguizamo. Just don't blame the source material.

The 1986 Japanese anime Super Mario Bros: Great Mission to Rescue Peach! manages to be more watchable, more charming, and far less wince-inducing than the American adaptation. Though you'd be hard-pressed to qualify Great Mission as anything but shallow children's entertainment, it's still a heck of a lot more endearing than the American version. The characters are actually cute, rather than terrifying, and the reach of the intensely minimalist story never exceeds its grasp, or the audience's attention span. True, the entire plot is spelled out in its title, but the flick is a full half-hour shorter than the American version -- even if you don't end up liking either, you'll suffer much less with the Japanese version.

Plus, you can watch the anime for free on YouTube.

Continue reading "A Super Mario World Apart - Comparing American and Japanese Video Game Movies" »

For every licensed video game produced as a cheap cash-in for a summer movie (G.I. Joe, Transformers 2), there are those few that perfectly marry the sensibilities of their source material with the fun of interactivity. We've discussed this before. What we haven't discussed, however, are those movies that are overdue for a virtual adaptation -- cult classics so good, so cool, so wacky that they perfectly lend themselves to the medium. Herewith, my top contenders:

Master of the Flying Guillotine (1975)
Rumored to be Quentin Tarantino's favorite martial arts flick of all time, Master of the Flying Guillotine would work perfectly as a modern tournament fighting game along the lines of Street Fighter or Tekken. Every single character -- from the One-Armed Boxer to the Muay Thai fighter to the blind Master of the Flying Guillotine himself -- is imbued with such personality and such a drastically different fighting style that the thought of pitting them against one another in a virtual arena is all too perfect. Not to mention that roughly half the movie consists of a dozen consecutive fights between all these characters at a shady martial arts tournament -- I mean, the movie's structured like a video game already!

Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Yes, zombie video games are getting more than a little overdone, but true zombie fanatics still yearn for a game that replicates the tense, strategic feeling of barricading yourself in an enclosed environment and just trying to deal. We've had our 28 Days Later game in the form of the intense shoot-'em-up Left 4 Dead, and our Shaun of the Dead thanks to the comic gorefest that was Dead Rising. But we're still holding out for that one game that can teach us the essential theme behind all of George Romero's movies: When society breaks down and other people are all you have left, zombies are the least of your problems.

Continue reading "Big Trouble in Little China: The Video Game? Cult Classics in Need of Interactive Treatment" »

Ah, science fiction. Is there any other genre so well-equipped to tickle that optimistic, techno-nerd part of our brains? We see a cool, CGI-rendered piece of fictional future tech, and instantly we dream of a day when that same power might one day be in our hands (or minds, or tentacled appendages). That's where video games come in: No other industry of the last decade has been so uniquely devoted to turning science fiction into science fact. Years ago, you may have watched movies like Tron or Minority Report and thought them the stuff of pure fantasy. But believe it or not, Nintendo and Microsoft are already on the case.

Tron (1982)
OK, so Tron's actual technology -- namely, a big-ass laser that can transport objects through space -- doesn't exist yet. Still, the basic thrills behind the movie's action scenes can be replicated right in the comfort of your own home with a Nintendo Wii.

Take the scene where Bruce Boxleitner vaporizes an enemy using a Big Glowing Frisbee of Death (BGFD, for short). Gamers dreaming of their own BGFD can look to the Wii's MotionPlus (an optional add-on to the standard system), which almost perfectly replicates human hand gestures -- like, say, swinging a sword, or shining a flashlight, or throwing a frisbee. While the frisbee minigames found in Wii Sports Resort aren't terribly exciting, they prove that given enough time and dedication, someone, somewhere, will some day allow us to engage in tactile BGFD fights across the Internet. And on that day, Bruce Boxleitner will cry tears of joy.

Continue reading "Think Gamer Is Far-Fetched? Video Game Technology Is Knocking on SciFi's Door" »

Video games, as any congressman can tell you, will kill us all. Sometimes they'll train our nation's youth into assassins; other times, they'll glorify violence so gamers will want to emulate their Xbox accomplishments. As violent as games like Gears of War can be, however, they have nothing on the murderous, often sentient games that populate the movies. Here are ten that, in their varied efforts to end humanity, might convince even the most vehement anti-video game critic that a few virtual chainsaws to the face don't seem so bad.

10. Game Over, Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (2003)
If you have to get trapped in a potentially deadly video game, choose "Game Over" from the third Spy Kids flick. Even though the titular game is supposed to kill the child protagonists, being a children's movie everyone pretty much ends up without a scratch. Heck, given the fact that the game includes a "power-up" that grants the Spy Kids' wheelchair-bound grandfather the use of his legs again, this game might be one hell of a boon to society. Can you make a power-up that cures world hunger, too?

9. Gamebox 1.0, Gamebox 1.0 (2004)
A video game tester is sent a prototype console that taps into his cerebral cortex and immerses him in a virtual world filled with people from his past -- like his dead ex-girlfriend, and the cop who killed her. The flick could have potentially reached Fight Club-esque levels of fun, but unfortunate plotting -- the protagonist has to fight zombies and aliens in order to survive -- makes Gamebox 1.0 only slightly better (and more dangerous) than Spy Kids.

8. Nirvana, Nirvana (1996)
I could just as easily have put the Russel Crowe vehicle Virtuosity here, because they're almost identical: A virtual character becomes sentient and leaves their computer program to start killing people indiscriminately. The major difference between the two, of course, is that Nirvana stars Christopher Lambert and is about achieving inner peace to defeat the evil program, while Virtuosity is about punching people in the face over and over. Your mileage with either will vary according to how much you enjoy either Christopher Lambert or watching people getting punched, respectively.

Continue reading "The Top Ten Movie Video Games That Want to Kill You" »

Gamer hits theaters next week, and if you're intensely ambivalent about it, I don't blame you. Is it a goofy parody of video game stereotypes, or a lowest-common-denominator exploitation of society's fear of them? Is it a balls-to-the-wall action flick, or a weird "message" movie? I can't claim to know the answers, but I do know this -- given everything we know about the movie so far, it will either be cinematic gold or complete trash. Herewith, an exhaustive list of pros and cons to argue the case.

Pro: It's directed by the guys who did Crank.
Though neither Crank nor its sequel will be winning Academy Awards anytime soon, both flicks expressed a seemingly legitimate adoration for the ludicrousness of video games and video game culture. Directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor are, if nothing else, skilled in the art of creating silly, fast-paced action flicks that refuse to take themselves seriously and thus defy easy categorization.

Con: It could halfheartedly dabble in a lot of pseudo-philosophy.
In the world of Gamer, death row inmates are given a chance at freedom through a game called "Slayers." Human players -- teenagers, typically -- control the actions of competing death row inmates in an effort to become the last man standing. Given the sheer number of times characters talk about "power" or "control" in the trailer, one can't help but worry that Neveldine and Taylor are overreaching in some hare-brained attempt to create a 2009 version of Blade Runner.

Continue reading "Anticipating Gamer - The Greatest Video Game Movie Ever... Or the Worst" »

When movies are adapted into video games, they usually fall into one of two categories: Those that have absolutely nothing to do with their source material and suck as a result, and those that try too hard to stay true to their source material, and suck as a result. There is, however, a third, much rarer category -- those that find a happy medium between retaining faithfulness to the original and creating fun and original gameplay. Though there are plenty of Enter The Matrix-es out there, titles like Tron 2.0 are so good, they're movie sequels in their own right.

The Warriors, based on The Warriors (1979)
Rockstar's adaptation of The Warriors may actually be better than the movie -- and I say that as a true fan of both. Where the movie focused on a single night in the Warriors' lives, the game delivers intensely satisfying, old-school beat-'em-up gameplay wrapped around a great deal of (surprisingly entertaining) backstory. When, for instance, (spoiler alert for a 30-year-old flick) Cleon gets killed after Cyrus's assassination, it actually carries more emotional weight in the game because you've seen him build the Warriors from the ground up. In the movie, he's just some dude we've never met who gets axed so Michael Beck can take over. We also get to see more of Ajax in the game, which is never a bad thing.

Continue reading "Ghostbusters and Tron 2.0 - Game Adaptations So Good, They Should Inspire Sequels" »

For all the real video games that get adapted into large-scale movies, there are those other games that sit unremembered, unwatched and worst of all, unplayed; games that look alternately fun, horrifying, clever, and nostalgic; games that feel so real, we could almost reach out and touch them... if only they actually existed. Whether we're talking Space Paranoids in Tron or Wrestle Jam '88 in The Wrestler, Hollywood is awfully good at making up video games that the rest of us desperately want to play. I've compiled my favorites, in the hopes that I might one day get my hands on them.

eXistenZ, as seen in eXistenZ (1999)
I'll be the first to admit that, should a game like eXistenZ ever exist, it would probably be responsible for the downfall of society and the slow death of humanity. Still, the game might be fun for a little while. Serving as both the subject matter and title of David Cronenberg's spiritual successor to Videodrome, eXistenZ is a virtual reality game that is indistinguishable from real life. That is, if real life consisted of huge military conspiracies, domestic terrorists and guns made out of Chinese food and human teeth. The movie takes an immense, borderline-sadistic pleasure in assuring the viewer that what they are watching takes place in the "real" world before suddenly pulling out the carpet and revealing -- whoops! -- it's all been part of a simulation within a simulation. Either way, the actual eXistenZ game seems so patently bizarre (you play by hooking a fleshy-looking game system into the back of your spine), I can't help but be interested in the prospect of it. Sort of like Suda 51, cranked up to eleven.

Continue reading "The Coolest Video Games That Don't Exist, Featured in Movies That Do" »

Our last discussion on how video game movies are hurting the perception of the interactive medium left little doubt that gamers are feeling a bit, well, pessimistic about the chances of a decent adaptation in their lifetimes. We gaming moviegoers live in a media landscape that needs a shot in the arm, a new perspective. Simply put, we need a hero. And David Hayter might well be that man.

Known to moviegoers as the co-screenwriter for the first two X-Men movies, Hayter is looking to make his directorial debut with the big-screen adaptation of Lost Planet, a reasonably well-received shooter for the Xbox 360. How is it that this man, whose better movies may well be overshadowed by his lesser ones (Hayter also co-wrote The Scorpion King and the recent Watchmen adaptation), is in a position to revitalize the entire video game movie genre? Read on, and prepare for hope.

Continue reading "Lost Planet's David Hayter - The Video Game Movie Messiah" »

In a media-saturated world of random violence and juvenile delinquency, video games are one of the least respected art forms around. "They're too violent," many say. "They're shallow." Given the medium's propensity for power fantasies and D-cups, perhaps games have rightfully earned some of this scorn -- but we should also place some blame on the movies adapted from them. Flicks like Hitman and Alone in the Dark are the most exposure some people get to video games. So it's easy to see how the populace-at-large looks at the medium as mindless, derivative violence. Today, I'd like to counter a few assumptions your average moviegoer might glean about games from Hollywood's horrific adaptations.

Not all video games are dumbed-down versions of existing movies
It would be dishonest to suggest that modern action games don't take a page or two from Hollywood's library, but most decent titles manage to switch up the clichéd formulas to which moviegoers have become so accustomed. Take Max Payne, which may consist primarily of John Woo-esque gunplay, but also provides haunting, impressionistic scenes where Max is tasked with running across solid trails of blood that hover above a black abyss while he searches for his dead infant daughter. You ain't gonna see that in a Michael Bay movie.

Continue reading "Video Games' Worst Enemy? Video-Game Movies" »