Ryan Fleming rides to the rescue, to save the show from sibling rivalries, and revelations about the human condition that will change the way you look at some of your favorite fictional characters. Before he can make it, the best (such as it is) video game movie is discussed, as is Cort’s weekend at a cheese factory, which is as pungent an adventure as you might think it is, before Bobby discusses his wife abandoning him to figure his way out of a self-made Super Mario water level while exploring the Oregon Coast. And then, once Ryan arrives, we discuss the upcoming Walking Dead FPS, which seems a horrible idea considering how the firing of guns isn’t the best option most of the time in that universe; the Assassin’s Creed movie that Michael Fassbender is helping to make; a new Pitfall game is coming; and how gamers seem to have come around to the idea that you don’t need a game to be made into a movie in order to be “validated” anymore.
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{ 23 comments… read them below or add one }
First!!
I’m not happy about this being rebooted. Raping my internet childhood.
seafoam is whale jizz!!!
Fatboy, you are so good at that annoying child impression that I may have just reached into my own chest and up into my own skull so I could piston my hand back and forth hoping to severe several connections related to hearing. Missed the typing related zones.
Also, Fassbender isn’t too old for Assassin’s Creed. ***(Mild Spoilers)*** Ezio ended up 65+ and I believe Altair was fucking 900. ***(End Spoilers)***. I’m cautiously optimistic; I remember the days of The Rock set to be in Doom.
sever*
You guys need a 5 second delete button. Rather, I need a 5 second delete button. Just in life, really.
The Silent Hill movie was pretty good.
Which you mentioned in the show. I have to get out of textbox mode.
There was a Max Payne movie, but that wasnt very good either. I am so hyped for this AC Movie
The best Max Payne movie is not the one featuring Mark Whalberg, but rather the version playing in my head – sticking to the original storyline. But that probably doesn’t count…
Max Payne 3′s storyline was better than half the action movies out there today. So was Uncharted 2 and 3.
I’m actually kinda optimistic about the AC movie. I like Fassbender as an actor, and he can walk the line between charming and Magneto Nazi Hunter. Plus now that he is signed on to co-produce, he has a lot of motivation to make it not suck.
YOU SHALL NOT COME INTO THE BATHROOM! IM DOING STUFF IN HERE!
There is a game that is doing exactly what the Walking Dead Activision game but so much better called Day Z. It is a mod of ARMA II and from what I can tell is it is pretty fun since I have a mac.
What? Everyone doesn’t masturbate to LOTR? Weird. Odd man out I guess.
Woman DO NOT poop. That is a myth.
Fatboy ruined me on Barney Miller for life. Jack Soo and Abe Vigoda’s “ooohhh” face. What can never be unseen.
You get internet cookies for namedropping Jack in a comments thread. There should be more Barney Miller references as a whole.
I wanted to clarify something: There are no good video game movies. Sure, there have been a few that have been passable, but in my mind they all suck because they all feature the same lack of care, and so they are all varying degrees of bad. Mortal Kombat, Silent Hill, Prince of Persia, Final Fantasy–they are all just crap, and I can’t get behind any of them until the industry realizes that they don’t have to be terrible.
We just need that one breakthrough film that opens the flood gates, and after that it will probably be like comic films now. Until then though, they are all crap. Every single one of them, even the ones that aren’t awful.
I forget which columnist said it, but I believe it, and have been repeating it: We’ll get a good movie based on a video game when the people who grew up with video games are making films, because they’ll have internalized what in gaming makes for good storytelling, and will use that in their film.
We’re pretty much already at that point – it’s just a matter of time, and waiting to see who will be responsible.
Basically – the first person who hires Edgar Wright or Joe Cornish to make a video game movie wins.
I think the key will be to find a filmmaker who understands what made the original source material resonate with the gamers. A part of the problem is that, with the movies they’ve made thus far, they tend to move away from the important bits.
What I mean is, if the story is the best part they’ve tended to change the stories. (Case in point: Max Payne). If the setting is the best part, they’ve tended to change that as well (Case in point: Doom, which for som unknown reason was no longer about a man moving deeper and deeper into Hell itself). And if the gameplay itself is the most important aspect, well, you’re going to have a difficult time making a movie out of it anyway (and you’ll end up with Super Mario Bros or just using the name as an attention grabber – like what happened with Battleship).
We need to get serious moviemakers interested in doing these kinds of movies, but only if they can understand what made the games successful in the first place. I hope that will happen some day, but I’m not holding my breath.
I think one reason production companies stray from the successful elements of the game is this misguided belief that they have to do both something original in order to capture the attention of the people who have already played the game and something less “gamey” to capture the attention of non-gamers.
This is misguided because most gamers will be willing to drop $10 to see the AC storyline play out on-screen even if they’ve already played the game BECAUSE IT’S A GOOD FUCKING STORY. This is also misguided because non-gamers will enjoy the game-originated story BECAUSE IT’S A GOOD FUCKING STORY.
Films certainly don’t have to be note-for-note like the games, but popular storylines are popular because they’re well-thought-out and well-executed. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Guys, you missed out on the big news for gaming on Monday. Ouya is running a kickstarter campaign that grossed over $1,000,000 in under 8 hours and is already at $3.5 million by the time you read this. Ad to that a very cost effective platform for both the consumer and the game developers and I can see this turning some heads.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console
We didn’t miss it, we just didn’t have the time to bring up Kickstarter stuff – I believe that particular kickstarter didn’t really pick up steam until the next day anyway, where it quickly got overshadowed by the OTHER kickstarter in the gaming world that made way more news. The one asking for a million dollars to remove advertising from probably the most successful webcomic that’s ever existed.
But speaking of Ouya – I’m glad to see people trying to get into the console game via Kickstarter, and their idea is pretty good, but from what I’ve been reading – this is basically going to be used by most people as a Roku box that allows them to run NES/SNES/Genesis/ emulators downloaded from the internet. A lot of people are basically saying “99 bucks for an HD capable emulator w/ apps? I’ll go for that.”
It might become something more after that, and I hope it does, but so far as gaming kickstarters go, it’s probably underneath the Penny-Arcade and the Anita Sarkeesian projects in terms of importance/impact right now.
I’d put the Ouya console over the Penny Arcade news (but only slightly). But yeah, the project didn’t really explode until the next day when it smashed its $900K goal. On top of that, I was late, so I didn’t get to most of the stuff I could have talked about.
There was also news about Paul McCartney working with Bungie, Valve using kickstarter, and a bunch of other stuff.
If anyone is looking for more news about Ouya, check out:
http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/ouya-the-99-google-android-game-console-backed-by-ed-fries-the-man-behind-xbox/
“Fuck you Fassbender, you old fart” may be one of the most randomly funny things uttered on the show lately.