It's certainly possible to make a movie with little, or even no dialogue. But doing that well implies a level of artistic vision that a director assigned to making a film concerning a video game is unlikely to have.
Unless you're talking about the kind of brainless action movie where the hero (like a certain governor of California) is too busy busting heads to do much talking.
Yeah, Zelda games do have a way of smacking you halfway through with: "So, you thought the game was almost over? DENIED! Go back in time! Dark world for you! Dungeon stew! "
Actually, I thought the end of Wind Waker was exceptionally powerful. It's true that the great ocean overworld wasn't affected by the ending, but the rest... man!
Spoilers below, if you haven't played the game and plan to, don't read on:
The big secret of the game is that the Hyrule of Ocarina of Time is sunken beneath the ocean, frozen in time, in a big air bubble. In the last scenes of the game, this Hyrule gets destroyed, to Ganondorf's loud, delirious laughter (though he wasn't responsible). I found it a disturbing, and yet extremely cool, moment -- that's the first time voice has actually mattered a whit to a Zelda game, even if it wasn't dialogue.
I love it! And I'm sure major dramatic hay could be made out of evil god's Moloch aiming a wide-angle disintregration beam at the player, it not working (because of eaten black gragon corpse), the music getting heroic, close up on the character's face as he realizes he's not dying, and then Moloch's astounded, anguished voice booming through the dungeon:
In fact I'm still not sure I'm wrong, though I admit your videogame approach is novel and worth thinking about a bit more. I like the idea, but I'm not sure if storytelling can be so well integrated into gameplay.
If you'll allow me to descend into English Major mode here (that's one major mode Emacs doesn't have yet).... I'm thinking you're referring to the player's actions, his interacting with the world, and the authorial aspects of that.
Or maybe, the backstory of the game, and how it can be deduced by observing the various incidental elements of the world, like a more subtle version of Metroid Prime's Scan Visor messages?
Yep, I realize that. But they could have licensed the name from The Tetris Company.
What they could do, if they were "hep," is license their Tetris ROM and emulator software to the next company that produces a generic Tetris game, who could make it into an extra or an unlockable. Sort of like the arcade Star Wars games in Rebel Strike.
Yeah, I made that correction myself in a later installment. Oddly, now that I know I can continue at a whim the game seems less interesting. In the arcade the limited supply of quarters in your pocket helped to add urgency to your survival. Here, you just press 'Y' again. Still, better than no continues at all.
Hmmm... you just may have something there. Let me amend my comment: the chances are slim that a movie studio can make a good Zelda movie, but if they made it the way you describe, then perhaps.
And I think it's possible to make Link's helpers (be they fairy or boat or whatever'll be next) into characters. Tatl, from Majora's Mask, had a lot more personality than your standard help system. "That's a Gecko. And it's pretty angry! It's pretty weak, too. It probably shouldn't be making a fool of you. It gets itself excited and then it just runs around. I hate it." When I think about it, Tatl actually rocked. At least she didn't say "Hey! Listen!" all the time.
Those help messages are in the game because there's always new players, and because many items (like the Hookshot) are not immediately obvious. Bottles are actually rather tricky for new players -- without that help message, most would never guess that you could do things like bottle fairies. It'd be nice if they could be turned off, but on the other hand, since there's not really a huge number of special items in Zelda relative to the length of the game, I think the description and music fanfare (Dum-duh-dah-DAAA!) lend a sense of ceremony to whenever you get a new goodie.
But I don't see how a good Zelda movie could be made. Ignoring the fact that Hollywood only makes movie-games when it's looking to make a quick buck and never when they want to produce something of artistic merit, Zelda's just too far outside their definition of "cool." If they made a Zelda game, you can bet they'd get someone really annoying to play Link.
Remember: three of Nintendo's big four heroes, Mario, Link and Samus either never or hardly ever get dialogue in their games. (The fourth is Kirby, who also never gets dialogue, but neither does anyone else in his games.) I think it'd wreck the characters to give them dialogue. Just like Sonic, and thus the Sonic Adventure games, seem a lot lamer when he's got a speaking part.
But the things that make Zelda great are not, typically, related to story. Until Ocarina of Time Zelda games didn't even have a story outside of a few pages in the manual, and I'd say the first Zelda game with a truly interesting story was Wind Waker, which has an absolutely incredible ending.
But Zelda games don't really have much of a story, typically. It is not actually a medium well-suited to story-telling. Stories are told to affect the audience, not have the audience affect the story, and it's surprising how set-in-stone most video game stories are.
It is worrying then that Boll is about to unleash an Alone In The Dark movie on the unsuspecting world, while he also has Blood Rayne and Far Cry movies in pre-production.
Worrying isn't the word. Hasn't the man learned his lesson from House Of The Dead? These are bad ideas! Take the hint already!
I played through it again recently, with 100% items. It didn't strike me as much the first time just how well put-together it is.
I mean, even in the first area, just look at the walls. There are places in the game where there's multiple laters to the walls, just for the purpose of realism. This game was a labor of love. I can't imagine how many man-hours it must have taken to develop all those textures.
This is actually not as good a collection as the first, because they got all their most classic games (that they had the rights to) out in one go. And it had Rampart, which was worth the purchase price all by itself. (I have to praise Rampart on Slashdot at least once a month or my brain tissue dries up.)
Note that there are still no Atari vector games, even though there are some that may be from the era they could publish. (Major Havoc would have rocked!) Also, no I, Robot.
Here's a little information on the best games in the compilation, from whatever I can remember about it without having to actually do research:
- Cyberball 2072 - (Atari) A seriously cool arcade football game, played with robots. The "bomb" in the game is actually a bomb! While popular in the day you don't hear much about this anymore. Imagine a modern Madden-like game with robots! Publishers aren't cool enough anymore to try things like that.
- Gauntlet 2 - (Atari) The star of the compilation, in my opinion. It didn't get as wide a distribution as the original Gauntlet, despite being a better game in almost all ways. Much more varied gameplay. Could use a limited-credit mode.
- Mortal Kombat - (Midway) The first game in the (in my opinion) overrated fighting series. Fatalities don't seem as impressive these days as they were then, and don't really add much to the gameplay. Reptile was a cool idea, however, a super-secret opponent that could only be found if you got through the first several fights without taking a hit, or something like that.
- Mortal Kombat II - (Midway) The second game in the series, still considered by many people to be its pinnacle. Fighting games are a portion of arcade history I've never cared much about -- arguably, they ruined arcades for anyone other than teenage boys.
- NARC - (Williams) A game I've never played, but many people love. Designed, I believe, by Eugine Jarvis, the Robotron guy.
- Rampage World Tour - (Midway) Good for all the reasons the original Rampage was fun.
- STUN Runner - (Atari) A primitive polygon racing game, but with a cool design and lots of great ideas. An example: The last level has names floating in the air at different points, indicating how far the best ten players got in playing it!
- Total Carnage - (Williams) The second-best game in the compilation, this is basically super-deluxe Smash T.V. with much more variety in gameplay, including a password system, scrolling levels and a huge number of secrets. Notable because to get the best ending you had to collect a metric assload of keys AND play through the game AND grab all the clones in the last screen AND grab all the presents in the end-of-game bonus round! I and a friend actually did the first three of these four things, and was really annoyed when we missed one or two things in the bonus round. Curse you Midway!
- Xenophobe - (Midway) An interesting, if annoying sometimes, game. Supports three players.
- Xybots - (Atari) An early first-person shooter, though I think it used limited perspectives instead of polygons like Wolf 3D.
and....
- Timber - This is a game I've never heard of?? I mean, I've even heard of Splat! in the first compilation (mostly because I got curious about an arcade game with the same name as a Commodore game I once created), but I've never heard of Timber. Time to do some Google searching....
Oh, I've not seen anymore mention this, but there were actually some fairly serious flaws in the first compilation, including woefully incomplete access to game settings when complete access would have taken slight effort (that really hurt KLAX), sound flaws in many games (Rampart, Marble Madness, Toobin') and shameful game crashes in Defender II (a.k.a. Stargate).
Also, while they did get S.T.U.N. Runner, STILL NO ARCADE TETRIS!
As the AC said, you have to have a controller in a different port of your system in order to play a character other than Warrior. This is because arcade Gauntlet used a different station for each character.
Gauntlet II, on the other hand, let everyone select their character, so it wouldn't have the same problem.
I agree, the documentation was horrible. This is why (plug plug!) I've been writing in-depth instructions for each game in the first compilation over at Curmudgeon Gamer.
Anyway, honestly, while I'm a little annoyed the game isn't GC exclusive anymore, it *is* a seriously great game. I'm just happy to see the sequel will get a GC release.
Something I haven't seen many people remark upon is how hip the first game's story is. It's silly, corny in a winking fashion, has actually good voice acting ("Hulk DAAAAAVIDSON's in the house!"), and bona-fide laugh-out-loud moments. "Duh! There has to be a plot twist! That's where everything goes wrong *once* before the happy ending?"
As for Dante being playable... how close was Alastor, a boss and hard-to-unlock character (though not as hard as Captain Blue) in the GC version, to Dante? He already has a number of Devil May Cry references, or so I hear.
I saw Devil May Cry once... couldn't get into it. What I saw struck me as incredibly self-absorbed. I mean, how many times can the game say or print the words "Devil May Cry" in the first minute after turning the system on? I counted five -- and who in their right mind names their business that?
To me, the best thing about Google, the reason I'd use it even if they fell down to Xty place in the Search Engine race is simply the announced, honest desire to not do evil.
How unique and wonderful was it when Google released their search engine with no ads, a clean interface, and no loathsome sponsored links? Even when they introduced ads, they made sure they're clearly labeled as such, and made entirely of text.
In short, Google treated me as a person, and not a pair of sticky eyeballs. Meanwhile, Amazon has long been known to be well acquainted with the Not-Not-Evil path -- remember the patent on one-click shopping?
Even Google's missteps have been honest. They have a cookie on their site and probably log searches, and Gmail may have privacy problems, but still, Google is probably the least evil for-profit tech company I know of.
I'll admit that I'm watching Google pretty closely at the moment to see what happens with Gmail, but honestly, so long as they're up front with users about what they're doing and don't try to bury the permission clause in the TOS language, I'm fine with it. I even had an idea for a kind of art project, a voluntary, massive, transparent clipboard sharing project, that I've given serious thought to implementing that would probably be worse than what Google's doing, but I still think it'd be okay so long as the user knows it's a privacy concern ahead of time, and has his attention purposely drawn to it, preferably with big red letters. In fact, for me that'd just increase Gmail's cool factor, as I'm so boring that any federal investigators looking at my mail would only get a good laugh and 100k of spam for their trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
It's certainly possible to make a movie with little, or even no dialogue. But doing that well implies a level of artistic vision that a director assigned to making a film concerning a video game is unlikely to have.
Unless you're talking about the kind of brainless action movie where the hero (like a certain governor of California) is too busy busting heads to do much talking.
Yeah, Zelda games do have a way of smacking you halfway through with: "So, you thought the game was almost over? DENIED! Go back in time! Dark world for you! Dungeon stew! "
Actually, I thought the end of Wind Waker was exceptionally powerful. It's true that the great ocean overworld wasn't affected by the ending, but the rest... man!
Spoilers below, if you haven't played the game and plan to, don't read on:
The big secret of the game is that the Hyrule of Ocarina of Time is sunken beneath the ocean, frozen in time, in a big air bubble. In the last scenes of the game, this Hyrule gets destroyed, to Ganondorf's loud, delirious laughter (though he wasn't responsible). I found it a disturbing, and yet extremely cool, moment -- that's the first time voice has actually mattered a whit to a Zelda game, even if it wasn't dialogue.
Really?? I'm using Mozilla, on a 1.5 Ghz system, but with only 256MB, and haven't had problems.
Alas, as this poor guy has discovered....
I love it! And I'm sure major dramatic hay could be made out of evil god's Moloch aiming a wide-angle disintregration beam at the player, it not working (because of eaten black gragon corpse), the music getting heroic, close up on the character's face as he realizes he's not dying, and then Moloch's astounded, anguished voice booming through the dungeon:
"I believe it not!"
In fact I'm still not sure I'm wrong, though I admit your videogame approach is novel and worth thinking about a bit more. I like the idea, but I'm not sure if storytelling can be so well integrated into gameplay.
If you'll allow me to descend into English Major mode here (that's one major mode Emacs doesn't have yet).... I'm thinking you're referring to the player's actions, his interacting with the world, and the authorial aspects of that.
Or maybe, the backstory of the game, and how it can be deduced by observing the various incidental elements of the world, like a more subtle version of Metroid Prime's Scan Visor messages?
Please enlighten me further, oh master.
Yep, I realize that. But they could have licensed the name from The Tetris Company.
What they could do, if they were "hep," is license their Tetris ROM and emulator software to the next company that produces a generic Tetris game, who could make it into an extra or an unlockable. Sort of like the arcade Star Wars games in Rebel Strike.
Yeah, I made that correction myself in a later installment. Oddly, now that I know I can continue at a whim the game seems less interesting. In the arcade the limited supply of quarters in your pocket helped to add urgency to your survival. Here, you just press 'Y' again. Still, better than no continues at all.
Hmmm... you just may have something there. Let me amend my comment: the chances are slim that a movie studio can make a good Zelda movie, but if they made it the way you describe, then perhaps.
And I think it's possible to make Link's helpers (be they fairy or boat or whatever'll be next) into characters. Tatl, from Majora's Mask, had a lot more personality than your standard help system. "That's a Gecko. And it's pretty angry! It's pretty weak, too. It probably shouldn't be making a fool of you. It gets itself excited and then it just runs around. I hate it." When I think about it, Tatl actually rocked. At least she didn't say "Hey! Listen!" all the time.
And yes, the cartoon was abysmal.
Eeee, the fight with the Omega Pirate *can* be annoying, but I always put that down to my own skillz.
I can think of one texture I wish they'd have improved. When going down an elevator, you can see the pixels on Samus', um, breastplate.
- John Harris
If each player leaves a bones level, then I'd say the protagonist is obvious: it's got to be the mumak that does them all in.
Those help messages are in the game because there's always new players, and because many items (like the Hookshot) are not immediately obvious. Bottles are actually rather tricky for new players -- without that help message, most would never guess that you could do things like bottle fairies. It'd be nice if they could be turned off, but on the other hand, since there's not really a huge number of special items in Zelda relative to the length of the game, I think the description and music fanfare (Dum-duh-dah-DAAA!) lend a sense of ceremony to whenever you get a new goodie.
But I don't see how a good Zelda movie could be made. Ignoring the fact that Hollywood only makes movie-games when it's looking to make a quick buck and never when they want to produce something of artistic merit, Zelda's just too far outside their definition of "cool." If they made a Zelda game, you can bet they'd get someone really annoying to play Link.
Remember: three of Nintendo's big four heroes, Mario, Link and Samus either never or hardly ever get dialogue in their games. (The fourth is Kirby, who also never gets dialogue, but neither does anyone else in his games.) I think it'd wreck the characters to give them dialogue. Just like Sonic, and thus the Sonic Adventure games, seem a lot lamer when he's got a speaking part.
But the things that make Zelda great are not, typically, related to story. Until Ocarina of Time Zelda games didn't even have a story outside of a few pages in the manual, and I'd say the first Zelda game with a truly interesting story was Wind Waker, which has an absolutely incredible ending.
But Zelda games don't really have much of a story, typically. It is not actually a medium well-suited to story-telling. Stories are told to affect the audience, not have the audience affect the story, and it's surprising how set-in-stone most video game stories are.
NOT.
It is worrying then that Boll is about to unleash an Alone In The Dark movie on the unsuspecting world, while he also has Blood Rayne and Far Cry movies in pre-production.
Worrying isn't the word. Hasn't the man learned his lesson from House Of The Dead? These are bad ideas! Take the hint already!
It's not officially a popular Slashdot game thread until someone's mentioned Nethack.
I don't know about a Nethack movie. Consider that most people get killed before the five minute mark. Will people pay admission for that?
Of course, adventure games do have to have some degree of storytelling.
Remember: Maniac Mansion was made into a (only slightly related) T.V. series, that made it through three seasons.
Seconded. All of the incredible work the early, "good" EA has done languishes because of the more recent, "evil" EA that owns the rights.
I played through it again recently, with 100% items. It didn't strike me as much the first time just how well put-together it is.
I mean, even in the first area, just look at the walls. There are places in the game where there's multiple laters to the walls, just for the purpose of realism. This game was a labor of love. I can't imagine how many man-hours it must have taken to develop all those textures.
Just allow me to say that you, sir, are The Man.
I've tried the trick to get the Space Jump boots at the beginning of the game and can never pull it off, even with instructions.
This is actually not as good a collection as the first, because they got all their most classic games (that they had the rights to) out in one go. And it had Rampart, which was worth the purchase price all by itself. (I have to praise Rampart on Slashdot at least once a month or my brain tissue dries up.)
Note that there are still no Atari vector games, even though there are some that may be from the era they could publish. (Major Havoc would have rocked!) Also, no I, Robot.
Here's a little information on the best games in the compilation, from whatever I can remember about it without having to actually do research:
- Cyberball 2072 - (Atari)
A seriously cool arcade football game, played with robots. The "bomb" in the game is actually a bomb! While popular in the day you don't hear much about this anymore. Imagine a modern Madden-like game with robots! Publishers aren't cool enough anymore to try things like that.
- Gauntlet 2 - (Atari)
The star of the compilation, in my opinion. It didn't get as wide a distribution as the original Gauntlet, despite being a better game in almost all ways. Much more varied gameplay. Could use a limited-credit mode.
- Mortal Kombat - (Midway)
The first game in the (in my opinion) overrated fighting series. Fatalities don't seem as impressive these days as they were then, and don't really add much to the gameplay. Reptile was a cool idea, however, a super-secret opponent that could only be found if you got through the first several fights without taking a hit, or something like that.
- Mortal Kombat II - (Midway)
The second game in the series, still considered by many people to be its pinnacle. Fighting games are a portion of arcade history I've never cared much about -- arguably, they ruined arcades for anyone other than teenage boys.
- NARC - (Williams)
A game I've never played, but many people love. Designed, I believe, by Eugine Jarvis, the Robotron guy.
- Rampage World Tour - (Midway)
Good for all the reasons the original Rampage was fun.
- STUN Runner - (Atari)
A primitive polygon racing game, but with a cool design and lots of great ideas. An example: The last level has names floating in the air at different points, indicating how far the best ten players got in playing it!
- Total Carnage - (Williams)
The second-best game in the compilation, this is basically super-deluxe Smash T.V. with much more variety in gameplay, including a password system, scrolling levels and a huge number of secrets. Notable because to get the best ending you had to collect a metric assload of keys AND play through the game AND grab all the clones in the last screen AND grab all the presents in the end-of-game bonus round! I and a friend actually did the first three of these four things, and was really annoyed when we missed one or two things in the bonus round. Curse you Midway!
- Xenophobe - (Midway)
An interesting, if annoying sometimes, game. Supports three players.
- Xybots - (Atari)
An early first-person shooter, though I think it used limited perspectives instead of polygons like Wolf 3D.
and....
- Timber -
This is a game I've never heard of?? I mean, I've even heard of Splat! in the first compilation (mostly because I got curious about an arcade game with the same name as a Commodore game I once created), but I've never heard of Timber. Time to do some Google searching....
Oh, I've not seen anymore mention this, but there were actually some fairly serious flaws in the first compilation, including woefully incomplete access to game settings when complete access would have taken slight effort (that really hurt KLAX), sound flaws in many games (Rampart, Marble Madness, Toobin') and shameful game crashes in Defender II (a.k.a. Stargate).
Also, while they did get S.T.U.N. Runner, STILL NO ARCADE TETRIS!
As the AC said, you have to have a controller in a different port of your system in order to play a character other than Warrior. This is because arcade Gauntlet used a different station for each character.
Gauntlet II, on the other hand, let everyone select their character, so it wouldn't have the same problem.
I agree, the documentation was horrible. This is why (plug plug!) I've been writing in-depth instructions for each game in the first compilation over at Curmudgeon Gamer.
Agreed, about the menu. That was awful.
This is almost certainly being put together by Digital Eclipse, who produces almost all of the emulated arcade games available on consoles these days.
Is there such a thing as "hardware cel shading?"
Anyway, honestly, while I'm a little annoyed the game isn't GC exclusive anymore, it *is* a seriously great game. I'm just happy to see the sequel will get a GC release.
Something I haven't seen many people remark upon is how hip the first game's story is. It's silly, corny in a winking fashion, has actually good voice acting ("Hulk DAAAAAVIDSON's in the house!"), and bona-fide laugh-out-loud moments. "Duh! There has to be a plot twist! That's where everything goes wrong *once* before the happy ending?"
As for Dante being playable... how close was Alastor, a boss and hard-to-unlock character (though not as hard as Captain Blue) in the GC version, to Dante? He already has a number of Devil May Cry references, or so I hear.
I saw Devil May Cry once... couldn't get into it. What I saw struck me as incredibly self-absorbed. I mean, how many times can the game say or print the words "Devil May Cry" in the first minute after turning the system on? I counted five -- and who in their right mind names their business that?
Anyway, I'm ranting. New VJ character, cool.
Don't forget that all the games that got 10s are GREAT.
Stick to your guns, man.
To me, the best thing about Google, the reason I'd use it even if they fell down to Xty place in the Search Engine race is simply the announced, honest desire to not do evil.
How unique and wonderful was it when Google released their search engine with no ads, a clean interface, and no loathsome sponsored links? Even when they introduced ads, they made sure they're clearly labeled as such, and made entirely of text.
In short, Google treated me as a person, and not a pair of sticky eyeballs. Meanwhile, Amazon has long been known to be well acquainted with the Not-Not-Evil path -- remember the patent on one-click shopping?
Even Google's missteps have been honest. They have a cookie on their site and probably log searches, and Gmail may have privacy problems, but still, Google is probably the least evil for-profit tech company I know of.
I'll admit that I'm watching Google pretty closely at the moment to see what happens with Gmail, but honestly, so long as they're up front with users about what they're doing and don't try to bury the permission clause in the TOS language, I'm fine with it. I even had an idea for a kind of art project, a voluntary, massive, transparent clipboard sharing project, that I've given serious thought to implementing that would probably be worse than what Google's doing, but I still think it'd be okay so long as the user knows it's a privacy concern ahead of time, and has his attention purposely drawn to it, preferably with big red letters. In fact, for me that'd just increase Gmail's cool factor, as I'm so boring that any federal investigators looking at my mail would only get a good laugh and 100k of spam for their trouble.