All Your Video Games Are Belong To Us

Posted: Sun Jan 16, 2005 9:35 pm

Good morning all. So far one week into the New Year I am down to 2 resolutions I haven't broken.. Speaking of turning over a new leaf, it looks at though the video game industry may be interesting some Hi Rollers. CNN Money is reporting media mogul Rupert Murdoch is taking notice of the success of some recent video game blockbusters. What does this bode for the industry? Well I tend to agree with most of the opinions in the column. I don't think we need any outside influence in our games right now. However I did like the idea of movie studios becoming more involved in the design of games based on movies. The recent success of Escape from Butcher Bay proves that good movie based games can still be done.

Speaking of movies. My luck of seeing several good movies in a row ended this weekend. If you were interested in going to see Elektra at the theater, don't. Wait for it to come out on DVD. While I like Jen and I think that it was cool the ER guy was on there, they didn't follow her origins very well. So here's to hoping the Fantastic Four will do better.

Guest

(a) But what could Murdoch do to games that isn't any worse than EA buying all licensingrights for any sport on this planet ?

(b) truely original property already is rare
Doom 3, Half-life 2, UT2k4, Halo 2, the entire ff-ing releaselist for last years games read like sequel-mania ...
Even the average 'game of the year'-lists aren't any better as they're filled with sequels instead of truely original 'property'.
Of the 5 pc-games I've got there's only one 'original' (Evil Genius) everything else is either a sequel (Rome:Total War, Sims 2, Pirates!) or an extension of an existing 'property' into the world of games (Dawn of war).

(c) Why is 'Pop Idols- the game' any worse than 'Doom 3 - the movie' ???
So far the number of crappy movies based on games has had similar succes-stories compared to the number of movies converted to crappy games. For every Tombraider there's been a Mario or Mortal Kombat ...
Even the average novel to movie conversion has been crap.
In other words : neither media-industry really understands what is needed for the other medium. They might 'get it' once in a while, but on average the best novels/movies/games are the ones that were made to be novels/movies/games.

(d) And why are 'unions' supposed to be bad ?
Sounds like a typical american attitude. I guess it's un-american to let the people that actually have to do the job get a voice in how they ought to be treated as humans instead of mere production assets.
If there's one industry that needs one it would be the game-industry because the government is too lazy and incompetent to fix the problems that exist.