There I was, circa 2003 installing a little game called ‘Soldier Of Fortune II’. I’d played the previous version and had hours of fun blasting limbs from as far as I could tell a legion of douchebags in wifebeaters and SS wannabees. The install finished and within the first 15 minutes of playing I was having fun manually chopping pieces of my downed foes skull off in something that Ed Gein would get an erection over. See kids, there was this magic time around when publishers didn’t really have to appease the ratings boards as strictly and things like SOF and even Half Life were just expected to be able to turn your opponents into a bloody mess of giblets with a grenade or in some cases a crowbar.

Now it seems that game developers are more focused on creating overly subversive stories instead on giving the player a little more poignant realism in the form of optional total bodily dismemberment. Yeah sure there are still gibs in UT3 and God Of War has bloody decapitations but all in all after being a gore hound for these earlier games they just strike me as a little weak. Which brings me to my next point:

The all powerful, game stomping, fail-safe line of the A-O rating. Publishers shy away from this because there’s a good chance that their product will be outlawed in several countries as well as shunned by retailers. But if you’ve gotten around to playing Madworld you’ll see the same argument that hack directors make when they want to show their cocks in their terribly pretentious arthouse film. And that is; ‘It’s pornography unless it’s artistic.’ This is why Madhouse ever came about the way it did and on that system. Considering that the Wii is barely above the PS2 in graphics power I have a feeling that this game could have been done far more violently years ago for the aforementioned system. (continue reading…)

Okay, the last 30 or so FPS games I’ve played fit into three categories of shittily tacked on music and I’m wondering what gives? It all sounds the same after awhile with a few composers that stick out; namely Inon Zur, Jesper Kyd, and Harry Gregson-Williams. You’ve got your vaguely Dark Ambient bits, the trip-hop middle sections, and the EPIC SHOOTOUT MUSIC. I am a PC gamer through and through and over the years I’ve seen a few changes in video game music. Firstly, when I picked up an Xbox when it was still cool to like Halo there was an awesome thing that you could do in certain games that supported it. That was rip your own music onto the hard drive and listen to it while you play said game. I’m pretty sure the only reason I got so heavily into Unreal Tournament back in the day was because I could blast Ministry’s ‘N.W.O.’ through winAmp while floating around with an instagib rifle at high speeds zapping things to a bloody pulp on the other side of a huge custom map. Okay well it wasn’t just the music. But when Trent Reznor did the soundtrack for Quake my giblets quivered with the possibility of fragging baddies to finally some apt tunes. And they were, it was awesome just like that Way Of The Warrior game soundtrack that White Zombie did. Well maybe not AS awesome but you get the picture.

As I play more and more current games(admittedly more horror based ones than others) I find there are only a few that really utilized something as simple as a soundtrack. Dead Space did amazingly with this, with an explosion of screams from what seemed a cacophony of violins whenever a biomorph would get dangerously close. Fallout 3 uses a very backseated version of this by giving you non situational radio stations to tune into which is an alright method but loses something when a very creepy atmosphere is interrupted by a guy howling like a recently neutered dog in your ears. Music is always a matter of taste and I guess that a lot of games don’t match their music either. Don’t make me mention the worst decision in game music I’ve heard in awhile (continue reading…)

There was this game that came out on a PC gamer demo disc a ways back called Ghost Master. It places you in a house that looked like it was full of Sims characters and the only real objective in the demo was to scare the living bajeezus out of a flock of obnoxious sorority girl by getting your ghosts to use their supernatural skills in a tactile manner. Each ghost had a ‘fetter’ which was the only way to bind them to things in the environment; a water elemental could be bound to something like a sink, a pool or a simple puddle of water. The determining factors on whether a mortal would run screaming off the map was gaged by a belief bar, a madness bar and a terror bar. Certain abilities would build belief in what he subject was seeing, as having a ghost follow them around emitting a harrowing laughter would build things like Terror and Madness. On first glance I had it installed for a short time getting a few kicks out of electrocuting girls in the shower.
(continue reading…)

We’ve all seen them on either a flash banner telling us we’ll win a new ps3, or that it’s the newest craze. Truth be told ‘casual games’ such as Peggle, Luxor, and any other cursed Mah Jong game that your grandmother used to pass the time before her next assisted bowel movement are designed for about two things. An addictive nature rivaling methamphetamines, and marketing them to the half wits with the attention span of a goldfish with ADD. With an attractive price point as typically being under 20 bux and the lowest rung of demanding of your computer’s specs it makes sense to the cold and calculating money grubbing corporate business plan. In truth, most of my favorite games to date are from publishers who went the way of the dodo, or were bought out and had their creativity stomped in the name of pandering to the lowest common denominator. There are always exceptions to this whole thing. I remember when there was a flood of shit like this, back in the day and even now in some Wal Marts across the globe you’d see a disc proclaiming loudly ‘5000 fun games for windows’. And if you were ever duped into acquiring one of these insidious pieces of slime it usually came with 500 different clones of about 5 different card games, mostly poker or solitaire based, a handful of point and click adventures, some very poorly done shareware of a game scrapped together on the Build Engine, some Mah Jong tile games and a few inane Breakout ripoffs.
(continue reading…)

Badass.

Okay, some of you may remember hanging out with your friends playing a little game called ‘Army Men’. This mildly successful game led to a few more sequels, and eventually a subsidiary dev group came out with the Heroes Of Might And Magic series. This fledgling force was called 3D0; A company that initially got together to try to build a next-gen gaming system to compete with the then reigning champ, Playstation. At the time they’d released a few nothing games that were nothing really to call home about. This is a story of just before they filed for Chapter 11 and flushed what arguably could’ve been a game that brought them back up in the world. This game was titled ‘The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse’. From what I delved all the way back in 2003 they’d had a good part of the game done. There were even ingame animation videos that showed Abbadon (the main character who not only was the chosen Archangel but also a murderer and a chain smoker) fighting goat headed demons. Originally 4 Horsemen was planned to come out on the Xbox, PC, and PS2. But just about when the shiny light at the end of the tunnel was about to deliver us with what looked like a badass third person fighter/shooter 3D0 went under. Now personally, I couldn’t give two shits about the next Army Men game but I did trust that on the whole 3D0 knew how to make a decent game. Working with the N64 graphics must’ve been trying as hell. But the infinite power of the Xbox at the time promised many great deliveries of games that had a great amount of depth put into them.

The other thing that first sparked my brain the moment I’d started reading up on this game was the fact that Simon Bisley of LOBO and Heavy Metal fame was doing all the character and environment designs in the game. If any of you ever read the guns, broads, and gore themed Heavy Metal Magazine you’re probably very familiar with Simon Bisley. If there’s anyone that can take a simple concept of a typical dreg and turn it into a badass icon of punishment then it’s him. The pre-sketches were so true to what the in-game renders looked like as well as looking like the first game that really pushed the Xbox to it’s full potential in detailed environments.

The story went as follows; The seventh seal breaks and unleashes the dreaded Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse. Abbadon is just sitting in a bar one day when 30 percent of the world population disappears. He ends up being the chosen one to redeem the awfulness of man. But first he has to find the other two mortals that are supposed to do battle with the forces of hell. One of them is a Psychopathic Serial Killer/Preacher named Jimmy Ray Flint. This guy you have to break out of a maximum security prison to have him help with the horsemen, he spouts religious babble nonstop and is pretty decent with the business end of a shotgun. One of the other awesome things about this game to be was the four horsemen were actual believable forces of evil. Famine was a beautiful woman who when you got close enough you could see the skeleton inside her, to glimpse this femme fatal was to take in pestilence. War was an actual war machine resembling a possessed medieval knight. This was the stuff of awesome we’re talking here. On top of this, the other mortal that was supposedly a chosen one for the redemption of the human race was a drug addicted prostitute. With such a subversive storyline I wondered what was taking it so long, it had the setup to be rushed to completion because everyone wanted it so bad. Remember when hype never determined how well a game would sell? *cough*Halo*cough*

This was because the initial showings at E3 had been a little rough around the edges. I guess the textures weren’t meshed exactly the best and some of the animations weren’t complete. But by and large it still looked promising in a way that games today don’t really bring us a view so creative. When’s the last time you wanted to play a video game based off the story alone? Metal Gear maybe, but dealing with the biblical prediction of the endtimes and turning it on it’s head; I get a little giddy. Perhaps it’s was just the utter subversiveness that the game seemed to want to offer me, but it could also be that around 2003 games started slipping into the generic FPS based around a Sci-Fi war or a historical re-enactment. This is definitely one that got away. However after 3D0 filed bankruptcy just about everyone that was looking forward to this game tried to find out who the property was sold to. It doesn’t look like anyone who would do a good rendition of it either.

Here’s the trailer.

It still saddens me to this day that we never got to experience this game and likely never will. As I understand it the same might happen to a beloved Ghostbusters game that was slated for earlier this month. But like so many of those games we’ve all watched pass by like Starcraft Ghost, Duke Nukem Forever and a faithful Soldier Of Fortune sequel; I’ll always hold out a bit of hope that this intellectual property gets picked up by someone and hopefully has the shine on it that caught me as being truly a game reaching above the static of cranked out EA games for a multitude of 12 year old mouth breathers to jerk off to their pals.

Halo: Jumping Evolved

-K

Now before I launch into the countdown I’d like to state that across the board Uwe Boll has gone down in infamy for buying up the film rights to countless (arguably) great video games and turning them into 90 minutes of eyesore. Which is why there’s only one of his films on this list. I could fill an entire 5 top bad video game to movie list with his career sheet from IMDB.com. Instead I’ve livened it up as to why some of these other poor attempts never stood up to the gaming experience. Instead the examples I chose were varied but failed for an embarrassingly close myriad of reasons. You’ll also notice that my choices are mostly in the horror/suspense genre. That’s because the games that succeed so well often have an awesomely intricate story that most horror filmmakers don’t seen to grasp, well not since Troll 2.

#5

The least of our worries.

Silent hill was on the whole was a decent movie; it had a decent atmosphere, some well designed and backed up monsters and the acting was semi-believable. Let me stop there with the compliments. Let me stop there because if you were ever sitting on your parents carpeted floor in your onesie back in the day of 1999 and you were playing Silent Hill; You quickly realize some of the problems this movie had. I’m not saying that the series of Silent Hill hasn’t had it’s hiccups *cough* Homecoming *cough*, but throughout Silent hill was about the slow building mental terror that deep seeded regret and sadness culminated within the main characters. The first issue I had with the Silent Hill movie was Sean Bean. I’m not sure if I’m getting this out the right way but I think every movie that Sean Bean has ever been in he’s either the bad guy, completely clueless, dies randomly or any combination of those three. Let’s see. Equilibrium. Pwned in the first ten minutes of the movie. The James bond movie. Was a bad guy that was chopped up in a motorboats rudder. Oh! Let’s not forget Lord Of The Rings, ‘Sorry old Bean, it’s time for a dose of Uruk’Hai justice.’ Even in ‘Ronin’ he winds up playing a nervous tweaker who is busy pissing his britches in the corner like a nervous cat when there are too many people in the room and winds up being kicked out of the otherwise three ringed circus of cock-smackingly awesomeness that is Jean Reno.

Which finally brings me to Silent Hill. Where the hell did you wind up then Sean? Clearly your demented and adopted child doesn’t mean much to you since you’re sitting quietly at home spanking it to Cinemax pornography. Sean Bean needed a more functional role in that movie to say the least, the only real purpose he served was to establish the layer of reality that the rest of us existed on was not the same one that he had lost his daughter and wife to in Silent Hill. Not to mention if you want to start anywhere in a series of movies with an awesome story you clearly stick to the first movie. It seems that they borrowed little bits of each game to make an ugly, bastardized child that can’t speak with it’s mouth and instead uses hand puppets made of luncheon meat of a movie. While it holds true to some of the creepy aspects it’s still not Silent Hill the way we remember being hunted through the mist by shuffling undead dogs. Silent hill was a good horror movie by today’s standards but please stop jumping on the J-horror train by sticking a few maladjusted children in it with long black hair in front of their faces and expect me to eat the shit sandwich that’s supposed to taste like awesome survival horror.

#4

How do you fail here?

Resident Evil. I remember the day I saw the trailer. I do, I watched and the thought of Milla Jovovitch wandering around the Raccoon City Mansion with only a few bullets trying desperately to stick together with her S.T.A.R.S. team members while taking refuge from the zombie apocalypse outside made my adolescent pubes grow a few inches faster. But like those shopping comparisons (What you expected, What you Paid for, What you got) I expected a tense and dark look at the deformation of science with a few badasses with limited ammunition in their pockets thrown in. What I paid for at the movie theater was another look at Milla Jovovitch’s delightful pancake nipples and zombies, oh yes. Zombies. What I got was sandpaper handjob of a film where pseudo S.T.A.R.S. members invade the widely known evil corporation UMBRELLA’s (dude, didn’t you know they were totally experimenting on people? Well hell, everyone else here in Raccoon City knew. We’re not surprised at all.) secret underground lair. Thingy. It wasn’t connected to a huge creepy ass mansion with giant spiders or snake experiments gone wrong or anything! HOW CAN YOU SCREW THAT UP? The amount of bad CGI put into this movie on disembodied hands in water could’ve been used to have some really cool shit in it! Also, I’ve never seen so many well groomed zombies! Why is it when in a video game we’re thrown into a dystopian world with a catastrophe such as Zombie outbreaks being the backdrop we accept that for what it is, but when they want to make a movie about it they have to spoonfeed us a bunch of not so scary bloodied up office workers in lieu of a true shambling horde?

Perhaps the biggest sin that Resident Evil perpetrated was that it assumed if you liked zombies then you were a blubbering simp that whined about whether Cheetarah was good in the sack or not. This simply is not so considering the Resident Evil games typically involved puzzles that made some attempt to stimulate one’s intelligence. What’s more is that after sitting through an hour and a half of complete nonsense I did in fact get to see Miss Jovovitch’s miraculous pancake nipples, along with a setup for potentially a redeeming sequel! Holy hell, I must be a glutton for punishment. But yes, I went to see the second one.

#3

Timothy Olyphant? From Die Hard? You've got to be kidding me.

Er okay, so Hitman wasn’t exactly the cream of the crap but for a series that was soaked in style, had an absolutely epic score put to it, which I will attest Jesper Kyd will give Hans Zimmerman a run for his money any day of the week. In fact I listen to him like I would regular music.

But this movie also likes doing things that were never a part of the excellence of playing dressup with the locals for a full two hours just to get that one perfectly timed sniper shot through the waiter’s legs into the target’s forehead. i.e. like setting up the recycled and asinine staple of pseudo love interest. There was only a brief moment in each Hitman game where he ever interacted with ANY females, not to make marks about Agent 47’s sexual deviance, though his bald head would lend nicely to certain homoerotic expectations…I’m getting off topic. Here’s the deal, Timothy Olyphant looked too happy to be a born and bred killer, not to mention he talked with that happy little Timothy Olyphant voice of his; completely ignoring the source material. What happened to silent agreement in movies? Back in the day of actual acting, the actors used things like facial expressions and body language to tell you that they could take you away to the land of gumdrops and candy buttons with their SHINY LEADSPITTING HANDCANNONS OF PROLAPSE INDUCING BADASSERY. If you’re going to make a movie about something that was fueled by fandom then you at least be as accurate to the original work as possible when transferring to a new media.

#2

Marky Mark passed the constipated face test.

Alright I have a serious bone to pick with this drivel. Max Payne brought the entire notion of Film Noir back into video games in a very approachable and functional way. They had basically made it a movie that you can play. You were able to watch each individual slug rocket out of your akimbo pistols into the various naughty parts of the fellow crack fiend across the room playing chess with a sculpture of his own feces. It was penis exploding, fragwin awesometown, population; me. I downloaded every mod out there to enhance the bullet time experience, with various Matrix mods, moves and new guns. I had everything and it was an awesome ride. The story telling sequences have been continued to be ripped off (Mirrors Edge) left and right to this day. This movie had all the hard parts done for it, and they didn’t even include any of the drug induced nightmares that I remember hating because following that goddamned crying baby along the little lines of blood was about as much fun as mainlining Dran-O into my urethra. I wanted to see that, I wanted the innocuous blowjob scene in the bar to happen, I wanted to see Max Payne get framed, but instead they explained away all the good stuff and left me with a serious case of blue balls. No Alfred Woden? You’d best be joking, asshole. While Marky Mark isn’t the worst decision, I’dve much rather seen Jason Statham with that awful look on his face every time Max Payne shoots a gun. Also. There was no real bullet time. NO BULLET TIME. Slo-motion is NOT bullet time. Thanks for soiling what could’ve competed with the awesomeness of Sin City.

#1

You watched this, didn't you? Yeah you did you sorry bastard.

You probably thought going into this movie that hrm. Tara Reid is in it, there’s a chance for a bit of eye candy, isn’t there? Also it’s based on one of the progenitors of the survival horror genres. Well damn, with such a simple silver platter to pick off of our man Uwe couldn’t possibly screw the pooch on this one. Well.

Here’s the deal, Tara Reid shouldn’t ever really be much more than a bubble-headed sex toy in any movie she’s ever been in, using guns on ghosts is completely rational and the forces of evil truly need no reason to crawl out of the woodwork to terrorize Christian Slater for his terribly failed acting career. I seem to remember in the age of text based adventures Alone In The Dark stood out for once as having a very logical way of playing through the game, it even showed a basic understanding of physics like; push box over trap door, dead guy can’t get out from trap door. Simple, right? There was no real strange puzzles in AITD put forth to the characters except how to escape the scary ghosts. Hold on just a second and since when was AITD an action series? Maybe this can be blamed on the general terrible filmmaking that Uwe Boll has been responsible for (though Postal was relatively funny considering there was no plot to screw up). The biggest issue across the board with video games turned to movies is simply this, the directors have never played these games. They simply haven’t. Nor do they give a dissected half of a rat’s turd what the fans want out of the playthrough version. Because fans never really did anything for a game did they? Moral of the story being that Hollywood is simply trying to rake in another audience and to some degree they’ve succeeded, because I went and spent 8 bucks on numerous crappy movies thinking I was going to get some degree of faithful recreation. If the most we can hope for in a video game based movie is general adherence to the original plot or story, then truly I never want to see another video game turned in to a movie. I hope to god they leave my Deus Ex right where it stands.

-K