This month’s round table is about the movies and how in the past they have mucked up the games industry. Any old school gamer can tell you about the horror that was the E.T. game, fortunately for me I missed that travesty by the fact that I wasn’t born yet. Still the games industry has had a pretty crappy time in Hollywood as well, Super Mario Brothers the movie anyone? We can also thank Uwe Boll for some of the latest stinkers as well. I might do another entry on why the games industry hasn’t successfully gone Hollywood, but for this one let’s take a look at when these two media giants did something right.
In my entry on branding I mentioned in my opinion the three best licensed titles to come out. So for this entry I’m going to delve deeper into why I think the Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (or COR for this entry) is one of the best license games and I think currently the best game based on a movie property.
We were first introduced to the bad ass Riddick in the movie Pitch Black which proved that Vin Diesel can take on an alien species and kick it’s ass. With a popular movie and a new interesting character, it wasn’t long before talk of a sequel surfaced and of course a game to go with it. However something strange happened, instead of developing the game to go along with the movie or play out exactly like it, the game was to take place before any of the events in the movie. Around this time it was announced that Vin Diesel had created his own game company Tigon Studios which would be overseeing the game made by StarBreeze. The movie was eventually release and was quickly forgotten, but the game however went on to win numerous awards and proved how well a movie property can translate into games. Now with the back story out the way let’s see why getting out of Butcher Bay was so great.
The first reason is of course Vin Diesel himself, it’s not everyday when a major movie star not only opens his own video game studio but also works on the licensed title about his movie. Having Vin Diesel on board for the project gave StarBreeze a lot of advantages compared to other movie based titles. For starters there were no issues with getting the star of the movie to have his likeness and voice in the game,
as he was overseeing the whole thing. In most movie based games there can be issues with getting the star to appear in the game (Minority Report and the latest Bourne Identity game as two shining examples), in COR however the likeness of Vin was incredibly close to the real thing. With voice acting, there are too many examples of movie stars giving sub par performances for licensed titles, here the voice acting was superb. Vin sounded as much of a bad ass in the game as he did in the two movies. The rest of the voice actors also gave incredible performances which helped pull us into this decrepit world (in a good way).
Another issue with most license titles are the graphics, either they look under par for the platform in question and/or filled with graphical glitches and bugs. In COR the graphics were amazing on the xbox, delivering a dirty bleak world that is Butcher Bay. Each area of the game had it’s own environmental style from the bright orange of the first area, to the dark mines that would come later. The developers did an excellent job of creating a prison that was hinted at in the movies and made Riddick the supreme bad ass he was in the sequel. It’s amazing that I’ve given so much praise to this title and I haven’t gotten to the game play yet.
Another issue I mentioned in my branding entry is that most license titles are made for casual gamers, all the fans who might not play video games and will buy anything with that property on it. This leads to two eventualities, one that the gameplay will be dumbed down for anyone to play it and that the game will be rated T and below so that it will get all the young impressionable gamers to play it. Once again COR went another direction, as being the only movie based property (that I know of) to have a M rated game. The game play of COR was anything but derivative giving the player the options of hand to hand fighting, run and gun, or stealth to get around Butcher Bay. Hand to hand was done incredibly well and ranks up there with having one of the best implemented fighting systems in a FPS. Gun play in Riddick was well done for a console game giving him a variety of weapons to use against denizens. In previous entries I talked about how I’m not a fan of stealth games due to the limitations they put on the player’s skills. In COR however the stealth aspects were done pretty well, using his ability to see in the dark you can set yourself in position to take out guards with a brutal attack. Unlike other action titles the stealth aspects are well integrated into the experience, if stealth doesn’t work then beat the crap out of them, if that doesn’t work grab a gun and shoot them from a distance.
The game featured some memorable experiences as well, (spoiler warning) in one section Riddick had to make his way through a tunnel with a draining light source which keeps the crazy inmates at bay and must get out before it runs out and he’ll be swarmed. The game kept hitting the player with surprises up until the end. Now can you spot all the things that went right with Cor’s development?
Tigon and Starbreeze made a lot of smart moves over the design decisions for COR and in the process avoided the stupid mistakes other studios made. Many license games feel like they’re just in it for the quick buck , and the quality of the game suffers for it. The game was not made at all to involve the movie, meaning if the movie sank the game would not have that negative stigma around it, which is what happened in this case. The biggest mistake avoided was dumbing down the mechanics to appeal to a larger demographic, which has been the case of just about every other licensed title. By now hopefully you realized the smartest move they made, which was not relying on the license to sell the game, and instead created an excellent game to sell the game.
Most license titles are created in the action or platformer genre, as they are easy genres to create games for (not easy to make a great game however) and it’s one of the most recognizable among gamers. One step in the right direction would be to see movie based titles in other genres. There were the RTS games based on Lord of the Rings for instance. Going back to Viva Pinata for a second, it would have been so easy to just create a bargain bin platformer and call it a day. Instead Rare went with a unique genre and the game took off because of it.
Who knows if Hollywood has learn it’s lesson about the games industry, unfortunately with this recent crop of Summer movies (Disaster Movie for instance) it doesn’t look like we’re going to have too many candidates for a good translation. Right now my bad game senses are telling me we’re going to see a crappy platformer game for that talking dog movie.
Josh
