BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Games & Gameplay >

The video game of the blockbuster movie of the comic character

  
 
Janean Patience
21:03 / 11.09.07
A while ago here on Barbelith, back when it was still dying, there was a thread about what a Doctor Who video game would be like that made me laugh. I'd not yet bought a second-hand Xbox or immersed myself into console gaming, so it seemed obvious to me: a 2D platform game where you're the Doctor, pixel scarf waving behind you as you run and jump your way through six levels, dodging enemies from Zygons to Cybermen to Daleks, collecting jelly beans for health and sonic screwdrivers to open doors, and at the end of each level you collect a piece of the Tardis. That's what licensed games were when I last played them on the ZX Spectrum. I saw no reason for them to have changed.

In a way they haven't. There's still a licensed game accompanying every big movie, and they're still mostly crap. Transformers: The Game you'd think could be brilliant, given that the movie's about fighting robots that turn into fast vehicles. But by all accounts it sucks just like every Superman game ever has. Cash-ins are cash-ins whether they're for an 8-bit system or a state-of-the-art console.

But there's a new breed of licensed game which really tries hard to do justice to its source material. Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, which I've raved about elsewhere, is one such game. It's hard to imagine how it could have conveyed the powerful joy of being a big green smashing machine more accurately. Hulk jumps onto planes and kicks them into other planes, he leaps and runs up skyscrapers, he rams Hulkbusters face-first into the desert and he whirls tanks around by their barrels before throwing them into the sea. Muttering "Puny humans won't leave Hulk alone!" while throwing a helicopter into a rock formation doesn't get better than this. And the secondary details are taken from Hulk's long history, even if they're tweaked to fit the game's story. The Abomination is the ultimate enemy. General Ross makes an appearance. Doc Samson is on your side. It adds texture to the gameplay, and allows the player's imagination to fill in gaps.

The game comes after a movie tie-in Hulk game by the same developer, I believe. So it was probably conceived as a Hulk game right from the start. But is that how it works? Does a developer get a licence and try to come up with a game that fits, or do they decide to do a game which combines a sandbox with button-mashing combat and then look for a licence to promote it? Could this have been a King Kong, Godzilla or Great Grape Ape game instead?

Rogue Trooper is another example. It's a great licensed game which shows a lot of respect for its subject and uses the opportunities the licence provides well. Setting up Gunnar to provide covering fire while you ambush a bunch of Norts is just like the 2000AD reader imagined. But, realistically, how many Rogue fans are there out there? Was this ever going to win a big audience because of its lead character? Or is it a case of a developer wanting some material to dress up a competent, if unoriginal, third-person shooter with and picking a character off the shelf?

Star Wars licences seem to be among the most important extensions of the universe, with more players than the novels have readers. Matrix games tried to be an extension of that trilogy's universe but failed because of the gameplay. What makes a good licensed game? How do they come about? Are video games stripmining our culture for cheap thrills? Or are the games better than the material they're based on? What are the best games, and the worst?
 
 
Janean Patience
10:55 / 14.06.08
It saddens me this thread got no replies. But it's actually depressing that with no replies, it's still only on page three.

Ultimate Spider-Man, which I gave up on this week, is kind of interesting from a licencing perspective. It's actually canon, which very few other games have been to my knowledge. (Republic Commando?) The cartoony graphics are a change from all the effects you see everywhere else, and the Spidey experience is captured very well. Swinging around up high, hearing a cry for help, and somersaulting to a rooftop to acrobatically kick some faces in and rescue a cop: that's Spider-Man. The swinging's well-realised enough to make even the races fun, and New York is well enough rendered for that Ditko atmosphere. There are heroes and villains doing the right things.

There ends up being nothing to it, however, and I'm not sure if it's a limitation to the game or the source material. The story missions, done as Spidey or Venom, are all the same. You chase someone, you fight some little people, you rescue some people and then you have a two- or three-part boss battle. I hate boss battles because they're nonsensical and boring; learn the pattern, wait for the bit where the bad guy leaves himself defenceless, hit him, repeat. The missions recycle the same elements in a different order.

But Spider-Man's life is all boss battles. That's what every issue is; a new bad guy who needs to be defeated in a drawn-out climax. I can't really think of a lot he could do that isn't a race or a fight. If it had been given a little colour, like a "I've got to get home before Aunt May or she'll realise I'm Spider-Man!" mission, it might have helped but you're still doing the same old stuff. Is Spidey just inherently limited, because so much of his drama is personal? But the Hulk didn't get dull, and though the bosses frustrated me they were good, challenging in the right measure. Maybe that's why a Superman game's never worked; he's too powerful to hang a game on. Doesn't explain why there's never been a decent Batman game, though.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
13:32 / 14.06.08
collecting jelly beans for health

That's jelly babies. I apologise for the pedantry.

I suppose the question with licensed products - games of films and presumably films of games, boardgames of books, books of cereal-packet characters etc - is whether the source material is transferable from format to format, and possibly from genre to genre.

If we were to read Pitfall and Tomb Raider as Indiana Jones games, which is basically what they are, it's quite obvious that what goes on action-wise in the films transfers well to a videogame. You can probably say the same about the Star Wars flight simulators. On the other hand, Alien has never worked as a platformer or an RTS.

In videogames, do we usually see everything? And is this counter to what a lot of films are about?
 
 
All Acting Regiment
13:34 / 14.06.08
Also, is there always going to be something poor about a game which reproduces an established format rather than inventing a new one? If you make a Command and Conquer style game out of a film, is it ever going to be as fun as Command and Conquer was?
 
 
Janean Patience
17:28 / 14.06.08
I can't believe I wrote jelly beans. I can't remember, but I'd like to hope I was joking.

Is there always going to be something poor about a game which reproduces an established format rather than inventing a new one?

You could make the same argument in favour of the GTA games. They allow you to behave like the protagonist of a gangster film in the cinematic settings of those movies, but there's a lot more in the from the videogaming world than the films. There were Scarface and The Godfather games - anyone played them? - that used the free-roaming GTA sandbox but haven't been much acclaimed. The crucial difference perhaps that a movie tells a story in a few hours and a game like GTA takes days to complete.

But the graduation from reading about Spider-Man swinging through New York to watching it happen in the movie is pretty amazing. The leap to then doing it is almost as good. What happens then is you enter the gameworld, and that's got to be built from the other direction and have a solid foundation of years of videogame evolution. Rather than a template imposed from above, from a movie or a comic, that doesn't have any depth.

Though Cobra on the ZX Spectrum worked because the game was exactly as shallow as the movie. Never completed it.

Alien has never worked as a platformer or an RTS.

There was a conversion of Quake set in the Alien universe, with a hidden Nostromo level and all. It was pretty good, but there should have been a more successful game given how rich the mythos are.
 
 
Axolotl
18:07 / 14.06.08
The original Alien Vs Predator game for the PC was absolutely brilliant at scaring the shit out of you, well at least when you played as a marine. This was due in no small part to the use of the motion detector and helped through using lots of darkness and not making it a run and gun shoot 'em up. If only the movies had learned from this perhaps they wouldn't have sucked so bad.
 
 
COG
18:40 / 14.06.08
Multiplayer Goldeneye on the N64 was great for it's time. Never seen the film so I can't comment, but I know some scenes feature in the 1 player game.
 
 
Shrug
00:45 / 22.06.08
There's a Rogue Trooper Game?
*looks excited and thinks about buying a console*
 
 
ghadis
13:32 / 22.06.08
I've got a Rogue Trooper game for my mobile phone. It's a bit rubbish though.
 
 
fluid_state
09:37 / 01.07.08
I really liked Ultimate Spider-Man, for all it's flaws. The perpetual boss-fights kept me from finishing it, but the developers did a fantastic job immersing me in the character. Or rather, characters - Spidey is utterly dependent on New York, and web-swinging from Queens to Manhattan was something I couldn't get tired of... except for the rest of the game. It lost a lot by limiting the city events - if there was even the slightest bit of variation in random encounters around the city (say, fighting more than two supervillains), I'd probably still be playing.

I've been playing the Incredible Hulk (movie...) video game for the last few days - again, not a great game, but the potential is fascinating. Suffers from the same flaws as USM, which is to be expected, since they're the same game. Replace Spider-man with the Hulk, make destructible buildings, include one supervillain (team) for random encounters. Bit of a waste of potential, given how much fun it is to leap through the city and scale buildings like some nuke-borne ape-child. See also: beating up the army.

The central flaw to these games doesn't seem to be a lack of skill or potential. It's the highly temporary nature of the industries they're supporting (or driven by) that prevents a truly good game from emerging. The aforementioned titles have nearly identical play structures, and I've very much enjoyed the options provided within their framework. Both clearly have some love, or at least drive, behind them. Unfortunately, both are insisting on clinging so closely to their parent stories that any real replay becomes an exercise in bordeom. It's a crying shame, too - if less time had been spent doggedly telling one story, there might possibly be some comic-licensed games worth playing. To be fair, I'd assume the nature of the business(es) involved requires a punishingly fast dev time. This would have more to do with the tendency to push event-driven sales rather than taking a risk on a game with longer dev time, highter budget, scope creep, and no marketing safety net.

Janean: I'd argue that the central advantage GTA has over most format-shifted games is the architecture of it's sandbox. The central storyline is an equal partner to the (very limited) permutations of it's environment. The story itself is structured in a manner that gives a fine illusion of choice, reinforcing the random nature and scripted goodies of the sandbox. There's a good deal of clay under there, and it doesn't take "teh m4d skillz" to find it.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
19:28 / 08.07.08
I'm a bit wary of reducing this down to a simple, one-sentence answer, but I'm going to do it anyway.

Most videogames that are licensed from flim or comic book properties are awful, because most talented development teams would sooner work on their own visions than those already established by other people.

The games are rubbish becaue the people working on them are rubbish.
 
 
Janean Patience
16:20 / 10.07.08
The games are rubbish becaue the people working on them are rubbish.

I say this with no little trepidation knowing your gaming credentials, Randy, but I don't think that stands up at all. Where do the good games come from, then? Did every single person working on Hulk: Ultimate Destruction have a passion for the Hulk? Unlikely, but wouldn't there be good programmers, geeks essentially, who were as jazzed about making a good Hulk game as I was playing it? By the same token, it's surely impossible that there are no programmers who'd just love to do a Transformers game, for whom it would be the best job ever.

Talented development teams would sooner work on their own visions than those already established by other people.

An analogy from comics: Wanted is creator-owned, Mark Millar's own vision. Ultimates was a vision already established by other people and with definite boundaries; Millar couldn't do whatever he liked. But the former sucks, and the latter is pretty awesome.

(IMHO. Wish I'd picked a classier example than Millar.)

fluid: I'd argue that the central advantage GTA has over most format-shifted games is the architecture of it's sandbox. The central storyline is an equal partner to the (very limited) permutations of its environment.

I read something today about Elite being originally designed as a game that didn't end. There was no final screen. GTA is the same; finish the story, get 100 per cent even, but there's still lots to do and fun to be had. Licenced characters have a narrative arc that ends. Does that make a sandbox more of a problem, the inherent limitations of a licence? Surely Knight Rider could have adventures forever?
 
 
Spatula Clarke
08:37 / 13.07.08
I say this with no little trepidation knowing your gaming credentials, Randy, but I don't think that stands up at all. Where do the good games come from, then?

I didn't word that very well. What I should have said is that the rubbish games are rubbish because the people working on them are rubbish.

The core problem with licensed games is that the license comes first. Publisher buys rights to popular license, has no idea what to do with it, forces it on development team. Often a B-list dev team, because they're the ones that the publisher can force stuff on without having to worry about the response.

Or, worse, publisher buys rights to popular license, forces it on development team and forces development team to produce a specific type of game from it, based on other poopular games. That's a double win for the publisher: they get guaranteed sales due to the license itself and they also get an additional bunch of guaranteed sales due to the public desire for more games of type X. It's maximising income while spending as little as possible in order to get there.

When things (rarely) turn out differently it's due to the circumstances behind the purchase or allocation of the license being unusual.

In the case of Rogue Trooper, it was because the original license holder was also the videogame publisher was also the videogame developer: Rebellion.

In the case of Goldeneye, it was largely a matter of good fortune - Nintendo had a revolutionary piece of hardware coming up, Rare found that the hardware inspired their game designs, the license itself had undergone a huge improvement in quality and discovered a newfound public appreciation.

And I suspect that where the Hulk game was concerned, it was luck. The developer or publisher wanted to copy the GTA model, because it was popular and a sound financial choice, and the license just happened to tie into that style of gameplay very well (the previous Hulk game, on the Saturn and PS1, was a terrible exploration combat thing that saw the Hulk having to find keys to open doors).
 
 
This Sunday
13:57 / 14.07.08
I think the best game adaptations are more a reflection of our interaction with the fiction-set (that is, world and characters) in question, and not so much focused on replicating the original fiction-set. Goldeneye ruled the world like slamdancing Greek gods blitzed on the wines of paradise, when you played multiplayer. The game left you in half-plotted scenarios where you were just trying to kill everything while everything tried to kill you, and some asshole called it a mission. It was more about being in an action film, than it was about being Bond. For one thing, you couldn't sleep with or drink anything.

The finest Star Wars game for my money, was the two-person fighter, because it avoided giving you replays of plots we'd already seen and knew well enough the end, beginning, middle and late-nineties revision of. It allowed you to work on serious issues like whether Han Solo could take Darth Vader in a fair fight.

There's not a great deal of fun, to my mind, in playing the sorts of games that just walk you through something you'd already seen or read happen the right way only to find out you suck at blowing up the Deathstar. Something like the early Alien vs Predator games or Godzilla: Generations (which gives you new empathy for the big guy trying to blast annoying humans with incredibly difficult to aim atomic firebreath) does a much more satisfying job.

A Simpsons game that is an exact replica of watching the show just isn't going to be that fun. And it'll never be as funny. But one where you answer important questions like what happens if Bart fought aliens on his skateboard? A Dragon Ball Z game that helps you understand how annoying random powerups and an enemy who can float up and down while you're trying to throw energy things at them?
 
 
Spatula Clarke
15:31 / 14.07.08
The finest Star Wars game for my money, was the two-person fighter

Masters of Teras Kasi? Dude, that's widely accepted as the one of the worst Star Wars games ever, and one of the worst uses of a license to boot.
 
 
Axolotl
16:10 / 14.07.08
Yeah, sorry, but it did suck big time. It was possibly the worst Star Wars game I ever played, and this is from someone who bought Force Commander.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
16:28 / 14.07.08
The core problem with licensed games is that the license comes first. Publisher buys rights to popular license, has no idea what to do with it, forces it on development team. Often a B-list dev team, because they're the ones that the publisher can force stuff on without having to worry about the response.

Or, worse, publisher buys rights to popular license, forces it on development team and forces development team to produce a specific type of game from it, based on other poopular games. That's a double win for the publisher: they get guaranteed sales due to the license itself and they also get an additional bunch of guaranteed sales due to the public desire for more games of type X. It's maximising income while spending as little as possible in order to get there.

This is all true. Also worth considering is that with movie franchises in particular, there's often a time pressure which isn't quite so rigid with non-franchised games.

In a climate in which games (any games) are regularly shipped unfinished, in need of fuck knows how many patches before they even work properly, adding the problem of "this CAN'T slip schedule AT ALL, it absolutely HAS to be out two weeks before the movie is released" is not really gonna help.

Look at "Enter The Matrix". That had potential. It's actually more painful to play than a genuinely bad game would be, because you can SEE the decent game in it. The one they didn't have time to finish making. Two more months, and that could have been cool. But because of the whole "must come out in conjunction with the sequels" thing, it, well, wasn't. (Mind you, a lot of it was still better than the movies themselves).
 
 
This Sunday
16:51 / 14.07.08
I didn't realize how low my general opinion of SW games was until just now. The other end of that being that I think I could call more than half a dozen friends before I found someone who didn't buy a Star Wars game and then try to pawn it off/exchang it for credit within the month.

I stand by everything I said above, except maybe my very very biased Star Wars bits.

(And, really, most people that played Godzilla: Generations weren't too happy with it, either. Slow, awkward, and kinda pointless, like a bizarro ChuChu Rocket.)
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
17:06 / 14.07.08
The other end of that being that I think I could call more than half a dozen friends before I found someone who didn't buy a Star Wars game and then try to pawn it off/exchang it for credit within the month.

DUDE!!!

Knights of the Old Republic!!!

And Jedi Academy wasn't bad...

but KotOR's fucking amazing! Franchised game it may be, but it's still a standard by which RPGs are often judged, and rightly so!

And... well, there's Lego Star Wars (both of them being awesome)... the old Tie Fighter...

I think the problem is that there are a LOT of Star Wars games, and many of them are balls. When it's done right, though, the franchised aspect of them can be a wonderful thing. KotOR was ace because it USED the Star Wars universe to do cool shit, rather than try to recreate the movies in a game. As a result, it FELT a lot more "Star Wars-y" than many of the others, because it could play to the strengths of the medium while gaining power from the backstory, rather than being a game that wished it was a movie.
 
 
fluid_state
04:32 / 15.07.08
Randy: (not having any actual gaming credentials) I'd add that Goldeneye was somewhat forced to be a success, given that the franchise was very actively trying to be ressurrected, big-bang style. It looked like the talent involved was allowed/given excellent focus.

The Star Wars license should probably be one of the barometers for any discussion of this type. Given the, uh, enthusiastic nature of it's fanbase, the tech it's corporate master can bring to bear, and the marketing juggernaut behind it, not one of it's games have any excuse for being, say, Force Commander. Though that license seems to have become a "throw gameplay at a wall and see what sticks" approach, due to the factors above. It's interesting to note that there's a Teras Kasi fan in here, though* - maybe that approach, deep pockets and shallow intent, works...

Which gets me to thinking about the Lucasarts games that worked for me. Battlefront 2 - I could get in a spaceplane, fly into a big evil spaceship, sabotage it, get back in a spaceplane, blow up the evil spaceship, then land on a planet and fight the evil spacetroopers. Pretty much my Star Wars in a nutshell. The first Jedi Knight, with a convincing illusion of Hero! Power! Choice! in a linear framework, and cheesy full-motion video. Yup, that's SW right there. It might be why the RTS variants don't work as well - the source, and franchise caters more to an individual hero's Monty Hauling journey.

The Matrix (MMO) took a really interesting approach, and I wonder why it failed. From what I know, some of the principal actors were contributing to it, and it's in a genre that (now) has little market share compared to it's big elfin sister. Anyone play it that can shed some light on where it went wrong, if it indeed did?

Since Daytripper mentioned Godzilla: tough to do with modern tech, when a decade-old side-scoller like Rampage distills the core into a satuisfying multiplayer experience. Hell, there's a Jaws video game out there. Yes, you play as the shark, which makes me regret not buying it for 10 bucks. You'd figure that game would be a freaking lock. I suppose replicating the behaviour of one of the oldest killing machines on the planet really is like trying to reinvent the wheel.

* I have not played Teras Kasi. Jedi Academy, with a moddable Quake3 engine base, that's pure gold, but y'know, that's thanks to an enthusiastic community tired of crappy games.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
19:14 / 15.07.08
There's a truism that's often mentioned in reviews of Star Wars videogames: "this wouldn't be quite as good if it wasn't Star Wars."

To a large extent, the games get away with being mediocre because of the emotional attachment that a lot of the audience have with the license. You need to ask yourself if you'd still enjoy the game as much if it didn't have the trappings of that license - if it didn't have that Williams score, it didn't have those weapons, those characters, those vehicles, those sound effects. And, more often than not, the answer is no.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
22:14 / 15.07.08
That's true in most cases, but not all. Jade Empire was essentially KotOR except with real-time combat (and I never really had a problem with KotOR's combat) but a whole different milieu. And it was just as much fun.

I do accept that KotOR's far from representative of the SW franchise, though. But in a thread on franchised games, an awesome game from one of the world's biggest franchises has to be mentioned A LOT. By me.
 
 
Axolotl
11:24 / 16.07.08
KoToR is amazing in terms of plot and story but I think it suffers from being a licensed game - not the Star Wars license but the D20 system license. It just seems a horrible idea to take a system designed for pen & paper roleplaying and convert it to a computer. Work to the strengths of the medium instead.
 
 
Janean Patience
08:13 / 06.09.09
Doubling my G&G posts in 2009, I watched the Ed Norton Incredible Hulk movie the other week and what happens at the climax but the Hulk throws down some moves taken directly from the masterly Ultimate Destruction game. Too many for it to be coincidence; the Sonic Clap, the Earthquake Stomp, and that one where he turns a car into big metal boxing gloves. I've no objection - the game was among the better interpretations of the character in the last decade - but it's a weird way for things to go.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
12:00 / 01.03.10
I don't know if this counts, but I'm enjoying 'Dante's Inferno' on PS3. And look forward to more games like this; 'The Tempest' or 'Ulysses,' as re-imagined by the guys behind 'God Of War'.

The hellish boss battle with Blazes Boylan, etc.
 
 
haus of fraser
10:06 / 05.03.10
Not played that. Is it competitive or coorporative or some kind of amalgamation of both?
 
 
Alex's Grandma
10:15 / 06.03.10
It's basically a shorter, easier, but for all that still pretty enjoyable 'God Of War'. There are multi-player on-line options, I gather, but I wouldn't be your go-to-guy for the details - you may as well ask a snail about the rules of cricket.
 
 
haus of fraser
10:26 / 06.03.10
I like "naughty universe touching" myself.
 
  
Add Your Reply