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Hulk Smash! Lacks Subtlety
Joshuah Bearman's, over at the LA Weekly, continues to impress with his 'Pass the Paddles' column. This week he offers up an analysis of why 'Hulk Smash' needs a little more thought put into it. From the article: "If superhero games are so often terrible, it's because they're saddled with the flattening reductionism of superhero film adaptations. But superheroes aren't so simple. The principal disappointment with the film version of The Hulk was that it lacked the mythical gravitas, graceful action and ultimate spiritual reward of Ang Lee's previous masterpiece, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The film Hulk's oedipal and rage complexes were ham-fisted, and the action boringly brutish. In other words: Crouching Tiger was a better superhero story. (And should have made a better video game; sadly, that title was a disaster.)"
That is a lie! I gave you none of my piss!
But who could expect a different outcome for a typical dumbed-down idea for a game based on a movie whose story and direction were already lousy?
Yes, a game like this should allow the player to get into the head of the superhero. They should understand Hulk's motivation for smashing. What is he trying to accomplish by smashing? Without that kind of deeper interaction with the character, superhero games will always seem like a pale shadow of the stories we all know.
Marvel Comics Presents Hulk Smash: A game where you play a giant monster that goes on a oedipal rage driven killing spree. Go for teh win by killing your father and fucking your mother.
ESRB : teen
yeah, sure, go for it
=)
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Fitting in with my roommates continues to be quite a chore. It...confounds me!
/.ers would know).
Bonus points if you get the reference (I'm hoping
I'm not scared of anonymous cowards.
Many players would call GoldenEye 007 for Nintendo 64 the Best Movie To Game Conversion Evar(tm). It was greatly improved by the fact that the level designers took a lot of their cues from John Gardner's novelization, filling out details that were only implied in the movie. Likewise, the developers of Hulk video games could have referred to the comics.
The title 'Hulk Smash' doesn't come off as being all that subtle.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
Actually, another reason why the game would suck is because of (for those that didn't catch on yet) the "movie-to-game conversions must suck" convention of 1984 also known as the Ghostbusters rule. I don't think Hulk sucked because of the way the psychology of Bruce Banner was interpreted by the both the movie and video game directors.
The film Hulk's oedipal and rage complexes were ham-fisted
Exactly my thought :P
Hulk not like it too much either.
Hulk SMASH Puny Human LA Weekly!
The review seems to spring from someone who is still writing term papers froml ed-writer arts professor.
some post-modern-deconstructionist-head-up-his-ass-fai
It doesn't even appear that he played the game, he's just pissing on the concept!
Any comments from anyone who has actually played the silly thing?
You mean that a game titled "Hulk Smash" lacks subtlety? With a name like that, I thought Bruce Banner would be reading Shakespeare or something... ;-)
Just like driving a car:
(D) to go forward
(R) to go backward
My principal dispapointment with the movie was the Hulk looked dumb and the pacing was bad.
-Dave
"movie-to-game conversions must suck"
The parts of spiderman 2 which didnt involve the movie were good!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Circumcision is child abuse.
For some reason, the Hulk movie is a movie people love to hate. I liked it. Sure, it isn't perfect, but it's damn good.
Leave it to an LA publication to compare it to Crouching Tiger. If there's a place where people are in love with rehashing the same thing until it's run into the ground, it's LA. "Take no risks! Just write and direct another Crouching Tiger!"
The movie isn't like like Crouching Tiger because Ang Lee didn't want to make another Crouching Tiger. God, it's like people telling Robin Williams to do some Mork lines.
I do feel like Banner's repressed violence should have been portrayed more subtly, but we all know how things like that hit the cutting room floor. Critics may be won over by subtlety, but general audiences can barely spell the word.
To stay on topic... I very much agree with his assessment on the games. The Banner element is good as long it's not more than a tiny part of the gameplay. For instance, I might like a game where you play as the Hulk constantly but are haunted by Banner's thoughts and must piece them together. And obviously just smashing a city is going to wear thin, for players over the age of ten. A really successful game will be one that can find a balance.
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Usually when we see a video game review its a break down of the actual gameplay/graphics and whatnot, yet this one came at it by taking about the in game story and drawing comparisons to recent "The Hulk" movie directed by Ang Lee.
Not something you see very often which leads me to believe this was an attempt to view video games more than just a game in an attempt to legitamize the media as being an artform, which recently Roger Ebert stated video games could never be because of no real authorative.
I recall another conversation (not sure if it is the same one ebert made) that the video game reviewer often shoots themselves in the foot be focusing only on the game aspects and not the story, which in the case was the complete opposite.
Whatever the reason for his film critique like review, was picking The Hulk, ultimate destruction, really the best game to focus on?
Maybe he really likes the story of the hulk, maybe he writes essays or fan fiction based on Bruce Banners inner turmoil.. who knows, but for me The Hulk as a video game that is fun, comes out as a winner.
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
You mean except for the Mysterio parts? Worst. Level Design. Ever.
But Ghostbuster was a cool game. Come on, you got to drive around NY and capture ghosts. It even had a bit of speech thrown in. I dug it when I had my C64. No, sucky movie conversions started with ET, and then every once in a while, we got some good ones, like Ghostbusters.
Hulk Smash was a weak game, not because it lacked subtlety, but because it wasn't sufficiently fun. Like most games derived from movies it's just an attempt to cash in on the movie's success, and developers rarely seem to put much effort into these sorts of games.
As for the movie itself, I see no justifiable reason to compare The Hulk to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Those are entirely different movies. And while I enjoyed Crouching Tiger very much, I don't think it's the be all and end all of action movies. In fact, I can't think of a single friend in Taiwan who liked that movie; Ang Lee is Taiwanese himself and that genre comes from Asia. But the movies of that genre produced in Hong Kong, China and Taiwan are far more cartoony, and have generally weaker storylines. They're much closer to what you'd expect from a comic book. But the point is they're fun in their own right and melodramatic.
Ang Lee tried to inject too much substance into The Hulk, but probably was hindered by the need to still make the movie work with it's comic book roots. The movie would have fared a lot better if it had been more like Spider Man.
I don't think games need to provide some kind of dramatic cinematic experience. When I play a game I'm not looking for a movie-like experience. Most game developers are nothing but hacks when it comes to story. They take a contrived theme and stuff it into a generic world. Hollywood has quite a production line going for this sort of drivel and the game industry is already bad enough, we don't need it to get any worse by merging the two.
The people in the game industry who truly innovatived for the most part did so because they provided a particularly compelling gameplay experience. Absolutely there were those who pushed the limits of story-telling in games, but that in itself didn't define those games, and it certainly didn't define an entire genre.
We have the next-generation console developers spewing marketing crap that hardware advancements are going to open up new vistas in gaming. A more realistic rendering doesn't necessarily make for better gameplay, nor does it inherently create a more immersive experience. I've felt more for 16-color pixelated characters at 320x200 than I have for any pixel shaded, bloom lit 1280x1024 character.
I mean, by the reasoning of these developers books are complete crap because they provide nothing more than text on a page and you actually have to visualize everything in your own mind!
Developers were more innovative when they were stuck with bricks for graphics on the Atari 2600. Perhaps not innovative in terms of graphics or content, but in terms of sheer gameplay absolutely they were pushing the envelope.
Well, the point of that is that one of the things that I find entertaining about the Hulk is that he is not subtle and not complex. (Yes, I realize that there have been a few storylines since the 70's that made changes to this formula, but I hadn't kept up with it by then.) This comes through at some points in the game, such as when you hear a police report saying, "Be on the look out for Dr. Bruce Banner, suspect is approximately 12 feet tall, with green skin, suspect is considered armed and dangerous."
Of course, I'm a throwback, I think that if a game isn't fun to play then it is pretty irrelevant whether it has a great storyline or not. (Although I have plowed through a small number of games based on story and not game quality.) The Hulk: Ultimate Destruction is fun to play. It's fun to pick up a city bus and throw it at a helecopter. It's fun to watch the puny humans running in terror and screaming. It's fun to run up the sides of building and jump long distances crushing the concrete under your feet.
As to the cinemas, Ron Perlman does his usual creepy villain voice for Emil Blonsky. The storyline is good enough to drive the storyline forward, and the poor Hulk has plenty of opportunity to be persecuted by General Ross and wreak havoc on the city. Here's a review I find pretty accurate, http://www.pro-g.co.uk/review/221/
So now, here's hoping that the come out with The Tick: Ultimate Destruction next...
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
I think that the Hulk movie failed because it took entirely the wrong approach to the character.
Audiences were expecting to see a large green giant kick ass all over the place. This did not quite happen. We got a few decent action sequences, but the villian, and the primary conflict, just did not deliver on the expectations we needed.
I think that the movie would have done better if they had made the movie focus on Banners guilt for the damange caused by the Hulks rampages. It also would have been intresting if they stuck closer to the comic, and had Bruce accidently kill his father.
It would have also helped if they used a different villian. The Absorbing man is not a bad villian, but they re-working of the origin so that Banners father was a super powered villian was frankly quite excruciating.
END COMMUNICATION
mostly I meant "as a racing game with a spiderman instead of a car, it's good"
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All