So...about that District 9 movie...

I was only half joking about it being Halo.

Yes, yes, I know….Steven Spielberg is being rumored to direct the upcoming Halo movie. In a way, this totally makes sense. Spielberg knows how to blockbusterize aliens, so I’m sure he’ll completely sterilize the Halo mythology from any lingering remnants of video game lameness and turn Master Chief into a lonely, isolated young boy, man or teenager looking to connect to some other human and/or extraterrestrial beings.

I’d pay to see that.
Even if Shia LaBeouf end up as MC.

Except, I get the sinking suspicion I’ve already paid to see Halo in the form of District 9.
I’m not saying that it apes the video game series or blatantly steals ideas from it. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. District 9 is an incredibly original take on the classic sci-fi standby of first encounters between humans and aliens.

So, it didn’t copy Halo. It just cut Halo.
Consider these very important facts.

Peter Jackson signed on to produce the Halo movie. After viewing a short film entitled 'Alive in Joburg', he was so impressed that he asked the young director of that short film to make some teaser trailers for a new Halo movie. Unimpressed and wary of handing such a multi-million dollar franchise to a rookie directior, movie studies passed on the Halo project and it fell into limbo. That rookie director’s name?

Neil Blomkamp.
The director of District 9.

The producer of District 9?
Peter Jackson.

So, essentially, here’s what happened.

Big name studios didn’t have the stones to go with a new director for a ginormously huge gold mine, so they passed. Since they already had a bunch of stuff for the Halo movie, Jackson and Blomkamp just made another movie based on his original short film, Alive in Joburg, instead. This became District 9.

Watch District 9 carefully.
Do the prawns not look like Elites with their thin, skeletal frames, flopping jaws and oddly proportioned torsos?
Do the weapons not look like some of the covenant and human weapons from the games?
Does the prawn command ship not look like a UNSC Pelican?
Does Johannesburg not look like the Earth levels in Halo 2?

But it’s not Halo. And judging by the way studios work, I doubt Blomkamp will ever get a shot at making it. Which sucks, because District 9 was really, really, really good.

VVLTTP: The Bioshock Edition

It’s been a solid two years after Bioshock first wowed me with underwater cities, open-ended gameplay, and a ludicrous amount of Ayn Rand references. That’s been enough time for me to casually romp my way through Rapture a half dozen times, and read The Fountainhead about….oh who am I kidding? I don’t read Ayn Rand. Never will. I just know Bioshock really references it a lot. And by a lot, I mean enough that I might just read Atlas Shrugged to see if anyone has Insect Swarm 3.

Where was I?
Oh right…the game.
It’s funny that I spent a whole paragraph referencing a book to introduce Bioshock. Funny, and probably appropriate. I’m not one for that whole ‘Are Games Art?’ debacle. I think it’s a stupid thing to argue, since any form of media has creative forces behind it, and thus, artistic statements are made. All games could be considered an artistic expression on some level, no matter how shallow the endeavor. The trick comes in trying to decide what qualifies a game as a shining example of its kind.

Books, for example, have a wide variety of outlets that strive for different goals. Children’s books are not the same as cookbooks, and a Dean Koontz novel does not strive to be high-brow literature. The same is true for games. The Mario series carries about the same emotional weight as a Dr. Seuss picture book. The Resident Evils, Final Fantasies and Metal Gears of the world are basically Japanese producers trying to haphazardly slap all the crazy imagery of a Miyazaki movie into an interactive format. And then we come to Bioshock. When I first played the game late last year, I held the opinion that games needed to go a long way to tell a truly compelling story from beginning to end.

Bioshock changed my mind.

The thing that it does right, and that so many other games do so very, very wrong, is that successfully weds the advantages of an interactive medium with the central themes of the story. The story itself is only so compelling. In fact, most of it is downright silly. Something about an underwater city founded by an egomaniacal real estate tycoon and then changed forever by the introduction of DNA enhancements that fundamentally change man for the better…and for the worse. It’s vaguely familiar territory tread by many a video game hero before whatshisface in Bioshock.

What makes this one different is that one of the central mechanics of the game, the heart-wrenching decisions to save little girls lives by pressing Y or murder them by pressing X, actually feeds right into the game’s central theme: That you have a choice. A man chooses. A slave obeys. That sort of thing.

Granted, while the moralistic stylings here don’t go very deep (the plot doesn’t play out much differently whether you decide to save or murder the Little Sisters), the whole package is put together so effectively that choices do seem to matter more than they do. So help me if I didn’t feel a genuine pang of guilt every time I slugged Mr. Bubbles in the face with a round of electric buck.

That, to me, was the compelling aspect of the story. Movies and books develop a link between the audience and the characters by developing empathy. I always found it odd that video games tried to do the same thing in the same way. Bioshock got the formula right, mostly by throwing the formulas out the window. Instead of forcing the player through rigid cutscenes to forcibly insert emotional feeling, it simply says:

Hey dummie. You don’t need to feel for the character. You ARE the character. Do what you will. Learn as much backstory as you want. Or don’t. Save the Little Sisters. Or don’t.

That’s the bees knees, homie. And to think, it accomplished all that emotional gravitas without any prominent voice talent leading the way. After Bioshock, I explored a post-apocalyptic wasteland in Fallout 3, and hung my head in shame after Liam Neeson told he was disappointed to hear I became a cannibal.

Zelda And The Unintentional Sidequest into Middle Earth

Hello (!) and Welcome (!!) to the inaugural post of Press Repeatedly, a blog featuring thoughts from my brain. Thoughts from my brain that have grown appendages, broken free from their tanks, found a keyboard, and chicken pecked their way through hundreds of words about video games and video game culture. Pretty amazing, isn’t it?

So let’s talk vidyuh games.

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First things first. I'm a huge fan of the series, but seriously, they need to deLordoftheRingsify Zelda.

There’s a lot of common ground shared between Hyrule and Middle Earth. Nothing wrong with this. All Medievally themed fantasy worlds need orcs and elves like Disneyland needs Mickey Mouse. The bow and arrow can stay, but what needs to go is all the other stuff. It wasn’t until Ocarina of Time that things started going down this road. Wind Waker was a brief detour back into the bright colors and cartoony charm of the earlier iterations, but then it went back to the muddled colors and “adult” theming in Twilight Princess.

And it went deeep.
Designs, motifs, character designs, enemies riding on boar-like creatures….
I’m not even talking about story because nobody plays Zelda for the story anyway. It’s just a way to loosely connect boomerangs and squids.

Honestly, I was never quite sure TP was a Zelda game. It had all the familiar elements, and even added a dradleboard to make Link an elvish Tony Hawk, but overall, Hyrule felt generic. Really, really generic.

It may be a result of just years and years of formulaic rehashing of the same ideas. Nintendo really likes their video game mechanics. Mario will and always be about running and jumping. Metroid will always be about exploring areas, getting items, and then re-exploring areas with said items in tow. Zelda is about exploring dungeons, getting items, and then using the newly-acquired item to get back out of the dungeon.

There is only so much to do with these themes before they start to get tired, and Twilight Princess certainly started to feel tired. At least it didn’t have Tingle. That dude was a pedophile-tastic version of JarJar Binks in green tights.

More to come on this topic.
I have some ideas.