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The word is that J.J. Abrams might be making a movie based on the inexplicably popular video game series Half-Life. (My analysis of the overrated Half-Life 2 is here.)

Adaptations fail in the majority of cases because a story is usually engineered specifically for its original medium.  As mediocre as Half-Life the game is, it would be way worse as a movie.  So, they really can’t do an adaptation.  It would have to be some other story in the Half-Life universe.   But the Half-Life universe is, honestly, pretty mediocre itself.

I frankly don’t see any way this could turn out well, unless they get Ross Scott to play Gordon Freeman.  I’m sorry, but Freeman’s Mind is the best thing to come out of that franchise, and hopefully at some point the contractual imbroglio will be resolved and Scott can resume making it.

As for Valve’s Portal series, which Abrams might also adapt, it is a much better game, but again it seems like a waste of time to adapt it. This is precisely because it is so well-suited to game form.  The gameplay is an integral part of what makes it fun.  It would still be amusing, I guess, to hear the humorous lines, but the game lets you do that and enjoy the gameplay. You can have your cake and eat it too.

Now, there are cases where the original medium is not the best, and there are some games that might have been better as something else.  Metal Gear Solid is probably better as a movie, at least from Sons of Liberty onward. Neverwinter Nights 2 probably would be better as a book.  Duke Nukem would have been better if it had never existed at all. But in general, stories are designed for the medium they were originally created in.

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I posted about the movie The Haunting the other day and Thingy confirmed in the comments that the remake wasn’t very good.  That’s so often the way with remakes.  The great director John Huston was right when he said:

They can’t make them as good as they are in our memories, but they go on doing them and each time it’s a disaster. Why don’t we remake some of our bad pictures – I’d love another shot at ‘Roots of Heaven’ – and make them good?

I found out the other day that they’ve remade the famous N64 video game Goldeneye 007—again!   And today the “Black Mesa” Half-Life mod was released. Granted, that’s just a fan-made effort to satiate the demand for a new Half-Life game, so it’s a bit different.

Huston said it–they should do remakes of lousy movies, books and games.  Not necessarily the worst of the worst, but the ones that had potential and fell flat.  The game Daikatana was actually a good concept, it just didn’t work out.  They should take another try at it.  Alfred Hitchcock remade his own film The Man Who Knew Too Much.  And I think many of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories could have benefited from a reworking, especially The Shadow Out of Time.

Oh, well.  I guess it makes economic sense that only popular things get remade, but it makes no artistic sense.

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The N64 game Turok 2: Seeds of Evil is not a great game.  It may not even be a good game; it’s hard to say.  The graphics were awesome in 1998, but they are somewhat laughable now.  The combat is repetitive.  And the levels are long and confusing, with only one or two checkpoint save areas spread throughout them.  And then there is the whole question of “why is the hero dressed like an 18th century Native American while battling mutant robo-dinosaurs with a machine gun?”  Never could work that out.

But Turok 2 had one very interesting feature: in every level there were these little chambers that would grant Turok special abilities.  But there was also an identical chamber which contained extremely creepy, cyclops-like monsters that would utter threats of cosmic annihilation  in an otherworldly, screeching voice before attacking Turok.

There was, as far as I know, no way of knowing if the portal was a good one or a bad one before entering.  The first time it happened, it freaked me out pretty good.  The resultant uncertainty and trepidation about whether or not to enter a portal was a very nice touch.

But the best thing about this was that these monsters were very different from the game’s normal enemies.  In Turok 3, it’s explained that they are the servants of a somewhat Azathoth-like entity called “Oblivion” that’s out to destroy the Universe for some reason.  But in Turok 2 you don’t know that.  Even Turok’s guide Adon–or, as I called her, “Lost Land 4-1-1”– didn’t really know who they were or what they were doing.  She knew pretty much everything else a dinosaur hunter would care to know in the game, but not that.  That made it even scarier.

In most genres, this wouldn’t work.  To put in unexplained characters out of the blue is usually verboten.  But in the horror genre it’s alright because, well, the idea of monsters showing up out of nowhere is pretty scary.   So it was pretty effective at scaring the player.

People knock video game writing fairly often.  It’s a little unfair, because as I have said time and again, there are some excellent writers in the gaming industry.  But they are exceptions, and most games are definitely not trying to be literary masterpieces.  Certainly, Turok 2 was not looking to win any awards for its script.  (Adon and the cyclops-monsters may be the only speaking characters; I can’t remember for sure.)

But I think that for that reason, games in the horror-genre can succeed even without “good” writing, because what would be considered bad writing outside of horror is actually quite effective in the genre.  The good characters, Turok and Adon, are less interesting because they don’t really have any in-game backstory to make the player care about them.  But by the same token, the fact that the writers don’t give the player the lowdown on the servants of Oblivion just makes them that much scarier.

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On Freshly Pressed yesterday, there was a good post from Game Over, You Suck with Chris Kodoku about player character death in video games.  It’s about the paradox of how, since the player can always come back after failing, s/he’s not really that great.  It’s a great critique, and something most gamers don’t often think about.  Give it a read.

This is part of what makes the game Planescape: Torment so awesome.  It messes with this mechanic in a really ingenious way, to make the game very unique, and also a commentary on the way player character death is handled in so many games.

I used to joke about how, if they really wanted to make a game “realistic”, you’d get one chance to play it, and when your character died, that would be it–you could never play again.  Wouldn’t be too popular with players, though.

The other alternative, I guess, is the Deus Ex approach, where just because you failed at one thing doesn’t mean the game ends; you can still get chances to recover.  (Your character still could die in Deus Ex, though.)

There was a great article in the satirical online paper The Onion about this years ago.  It involved Solid Snake, the hero of the Metal Gear Solid games, wondering why he is always forced to “continue”.  It’s pretty funny, but again, it also points out how immersion-wrecking this mechanic is when you really think about it.

It’s funny; I never feel any guilt starting over from a save in a game like Doom 3 after Doomguy has met an untimely end.  I never seriously thought about this issue before in those kinds of games.  But I do feel some guilt for starting over in sports video games when I lose a play-off game or something.  That feels like cheating to me, whereas the restart in action games feels natural.

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Okay, I wasn’t actually planning to make this into a regular series, but events have just sort of worked out that way.  Blizzard’s “Battle.net” online gaming service got hacked last week, allowing hackers to acquire “sensitive data”.  Fortunately, Blizzard says that does not include financial information, but still, the fact is that online gaming made users vulnerable to hackers.

People play games to have fun, to relax.  They do not want to have needless stress heaped upon them when they are trying to play a game, because they probably get plenty of that in their real lives.  With the trolls, the technical difficulties, and then the threat of hackers, online gaming is way more trouble than it’s worth, as far as I can tell.

If any online gamers read this, I’d love to read why you feel it’s worthwhile.

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So, a teenager collapsed from dehydration after playing Modern Warfare 3 on his Xbox for four days straight.  He’s going to be okay, fortunately, and apparently his mom isn’t going to let him play anymore.

I am an avid gamer.  I could not play any game for four days straight.  Once, on a Saturday, years ago,  I played my favorite game, Knights of the Old Republic II for almost four hours straight.  That was definitely my limit,  and frankly a bit much for me.  In general, I can’t play more than two hours without feeling sick.

How did this guy manage to play for four days?  I strongly suspect he was playing online multiplayer, because (a) I hear that’s more addictive, (b) it takes longer to play because of the logistics involved, (c) I can’t imagine MW3 off-line holds four days worth of entertainment and (d) once you are playing, it’s harder to stop if you’ve got a bunch of other players involved.  This is yet another reason why I don’t like online gaming one bit–it seems to be the type of gaming that destroys people’s lives by making them addicted to it, much more so than off-line.

I like playing video games a lot, but you know the saying: “moderation in all things”.

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There’s an article in the New York Times about the prevalence of trolls in online gaming.  The article focuses particularly on their attacks on female gamers, but it also speaks to a larger point about trolls in general.  The key line is: “For trolls, offensive language — sexist, racist, homophobic comments — are interchangeable weapons that vary with the target.”

This is absolutely true, and the core of understanding troll behavior.  Trolls are not deeply committed to racist, sexist, or homophobic ideologies.  They are simply interested in causing as much trouble as they possibly can, and see such insults as a means of doing this.

The difficulty with online gaming–and this is another reason I avoid it–is that seems to have been inadvertently designed as an almost perfect platform for trolls.   Frankly, the primary purpose of online gaming seems to me to be to encourage trash-talking, and trolling is but a mutated form of trash-talking.

Everything I have seen indicates that the online experience delivers, on average, no better of an experience than playing the A.I.  For every highly-skilled player, there are ten unskilled players whose performance is below that of a competent A.I.  The only advantage online offers over offline is the ability to compete with some stranger, and beat him or her at the game.  And then, of course, the trash-talking.  Trash-talking a machine is simply not as satisfying.

To me personally, trash-talking in any venue is a pointless and stupid activity.  I hate it when athletes do it, I hate it when people on internet forums do it, and I hate it when gamers do it.  The difficulty, as highlighted in the NYT article, is how to manage it so it stays within decent bounds.  But the online gaming services won’t eliminate it outright, however, because they would be destroying their own market.  A blogger named Ferrerman wrote some posts about a related phenomenon on internet forums. (Be warned: he uses a lot of strong language to make his point.)

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This should tell EA and BioWare that they have a problem: I am a huge fan of the KotOR games, and yet the news that the MMO sequel The Old Republic is soon going to be free-to-play still does not make me a slam-dunk to get the thing.  I might, admittedly; which is far better than my “no way” stance before this news, but I’m still not guaranteed to.

Even without the awful problem of a subscription to deal with, there’s still the problem of having to get online to play the game, not to mention the hassle of making PC games work in the first place.

I am a console gamer, because you only need two things to play console games:

  1. console
  2. game

It is really just that simple.  If both the disk/cartridge and the console work, you can play your game. Contrast this with a PC game, where you need:

  1. game
  2. compatible sound card
  3. compatible graphics card
  4. compatible processor
  5. compatible monitor

And with online games you need all that, plus:

  1. stable internet connection
  2. reliable internet service provider
  3. reliable servers at the game company

The fewer single points of failure you have in a system, the better.  Online gaming introduces more single points of failure into the system.  If any one of these things breaks, no game for you.  (Christopher Knight documented the pain that “always-online” caused Diablo III players.)

This doesn’t even take into account the nightmarish trials inflicted upon PC gamers by Digital Rights Management (DRM) tools.  I’m all for protecting the rights of the artist, but for Pete’s sake, the movie industry manages to get along okay without punishing their customers every time they watch a movie.  Why can’t the PC gaming industry do likewise?  And if they can’t, then all gaming should move to consoles, since apparently they don’t have the piracy issues.

PC gamers tell me “but having the PC game makes it easier to fix bugs in the game!”  While this is not technically a lie, it conceals a key fact in order to mislead the listener.  The unspoken component is that bugs are far more common in the PC games than console versions. You don’t need to fix bugs on the console because there are less of them.

The other thing I get is “but I can download mods that aren’t on consoles if I have a PC game”.  Well, yeah, if you do somehow manage to make your PC game work and then feel like taking the chance of crippling it by installing stuff that third-parties designed, then yes, I suppose consoles cannot compete with you there.  Personally, I’d prefer to just buy a game that already had the features I wanted in it, but to each his own.

Diablo III and The Old Republic together demonstrate pretty much everything that makes me try to avoid PC gaming.  Alas, I fear that console gaming is already slouching in the same direction, and that soon the truly “single-player” game will be a thing of the past.

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Since I posted about it a week ago, it’s become by far my most viewed post.  Tons of people are getting here searching on variations of “I don’t get the NCAA 13 commercials”.

The game itself is, I have to say, pretty fun.  Now, granted, it’s not exactly super-realistic.  I play as Akron in dynasty mode, because they’re one of the worst rated teams, and there was a game against Arkansas with the final score of 91-49. (Arkansas’s favor)  Now, granted it’s a mismatch, but that’s kind of insane nonetheless.  My star receiver had like 2,000 yards and 12 TDs as of week three–and this is on “All-American” difficulty.  And the made-up players you’re supposed to recruit are all rude as heck for some reason.  But it’s still fun, except for a few freezing issues.

The “Heisman Challenge” mode, meanwhile, is way more fun than it should be.  It’s even less realistic.  I play as Andre Ware, and so far he has 32 touchdowns  and 3,000+ yards in four games.  The only competition he could have for the Heisman are his own receivers.  It shouldn’t be fun and yet, weirdly, it is.

(One thing that bothers me: why does Ware have the wrong facemask?  The loading screen clearly shows a picture of him wearing this mask, and yet in the game he has one more like Tom Brady’s.  And while we’re on the subject, what’s that giant faceguard Herschel Walker’s wearing in the above ad?  He never wore that. /end mysterious man facemask rant)

Anyway, it’s a very fun game, but it has more of an “arcade” feeling to it.  Which is cool.  The college game feels looser and more wide-open than pro, so that makes sense.

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My prediction of the demise of real-world sports might have one adverse impact on virtual counterparts: there is no longer the possibility for the thrill of changing the fortunes of a player or team. My Bills may not have enjoyed much real world success, but in video games, I can make them into a 19-0 juggernaut if I want. It’s kind of neat to see your favorite team win it all, especially if they’ve never actually done it. This trailer for MLB 12: The Show “makes its pitch” based on this feeling*:

If there were no more actual sports, this would be less exciting. People would eventually forget who the Chicago Cubs were.

The solution, I think, would be to let people choose backstories for their teams, much as they choose them for their characters in certain RPGs. You could have “reigning champs”, “fading band of superstars”, “up-and-coming”, “rebuilding” or “plucky underdogs”, just for a few examples.

*Hat Tip to Thingy for the video. She’s taken her blog down, so no link, unfortunately. (Come back!)