Over at IO9.com, they’ve linked to some game footage of Bioshock 2, which of course has me very excited, as I lost several weeks playing the first one. Although ultimately I found the game to be a little unsatisfying – a little too repetitious, and a lot of the things that were supposed to make the game feel huge and nonlinear, like the plasmid system, ended up being unnecessarily complex and confusing without really adding any depth to the game – it was still a four star game, with a great storyline.
IO9 also mentions a Bioshock movie in the works, which dismays me, because, as we all know, movies made from video games have been discovering heretofore unknown depths of suckage for decades now. I mean, has there ever been a movie adapted from a game that wasn’t the worst movie of the year? I submit that there has not. And I am never wrong. Or at least I don’t remember being wrong. The fact that I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday doesn’t change the fact that I am always right.
The reason video game movies always suck is simple: Video games can and have, at times, developed storylines over the course of hours and hours of gameplay, involving multiple settings, dozens of characters, reams of dialogue, and copious visual detail. A movie is meant to convey all of that in about 90 minutes, maybe 2 hours tops. It’s an impossible task. Look at Half life, my other favorite first-person shooter. You could make five or six movies out of the first game alone, and even if you boiled it down to major set pieces and cut out a lot of the crawling through ducts and puzzling over physics puzzles designed simply to show off the game engine, you’d still probably have a four hour movie on your hands. So the movie version tend to either abandon the game’s actual characters and storyline completely, or strip it down to monsters and special effects, hoping someone like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson can keep you entertained with just his pecs and eyebrows.
Video games are also getting increasingly cinematic, with graphics getting nearer and nearer photorealism and game engines getting better and better physics models. You see where this is going: As our computer monitors get bigger and bigger, eventually melding with our televisions and the Internet so that there’s very little distinction between them, movies are going to become video games, and vice-versa. Eventually you won’t drive to a theater, buy a ticket, and passively watch a movie for 2 hours. You’ll pay $50, install a game, and spend the next few weeks experiencing the story.
I’m actually looking forward to that – I’d love to write a video game, figuring out all the fun ways the player can interact and possibly even affect the story. Bioshock had a very tentative and small way for the player to alter the ultimate ending, depending on how the player treated certain Non-Player Characters during gameplay, but this really only affected the final cutscene and the mood of the ending, nothing else. While the programming challenge is huge, it would be fun to write a sort of “pick-a-path” kind of game where your decisions actually alter the game’s behavior as you play, in a significant way.
Until Bioshock 2 comes out, I guess I’ll just play Portal again.