Who says you can't improve on perfection?

This week rumours have been flying around the internet that Stephen Spielberg is set to resurrect the mothballed Halo movie. This comes hot on the heels of the news that Sam Raimi of Spiderman and Evil Dead fame is bringing a big budget WOW film to our screens, exciting stuff for games fans but don’t forget that most game to film adaptations are rubbish. However the very fact that such critically acclaimed filmmakers are looking to the game franchises for inspiration is an indication of the converging nature of digital entertainment. The balance of power between the two parallel industries seems to be shifting, film to game conversions have long been a staple of the sales charts but rarely have such big budgets moved the other way.

Games developers have been knocking out uninspired and often lazy film conversions for years (and vice versa as anyone who’s experienced a Uwe Boll opus will testify).

The ET: The Extra Terrestrial videogame demonstrated just how badly these titles could be done way back in 1982. Things haven’t improved significantly and terrible film adaptations keep selling nearly thirty years on. Typically these games are generic action titles, little differs in terms of gameplay and structure other than the avatar, hence they can be knocked out quickly and (relatively) cheaply once the license has been acquired.

The most recent of these cash-in tie-in games is GI Joe: Rise of the Cobra, ironically one of the criticisms of the film itself is that It is like watching a computer game – great fun if you’re in control but perhaps less so as a passive experience! It was inevitable of course that a game would emerge to allow Hasbro aficionados to enjoy the adventure on the small screen…Going by the typical standards of the film-to-game adaptation GI Joe is unlikely to be particularly good but will undoubtedly do good business over the summer holidays.

Surely there is IP other than films to plunder and potentially ruin, thankfully EA has come to the rescue with a God of War called Dante’s Inferno based upon epic Medieval poem The Divine Comedy?! In the spirit of the Summer silly season here’s some more classic literature that could be “improved” by shoe-horning it into a generic games structure:

War and Peace – The video game of Tolstoy’s classic tome dispenses the boring bits (the peace) to emphasise the war elements, this period FPS set during the Napoleonic wars would surely be a hit on the scale of the Call of Duty games. Particularly if we were to remove any references to Tolstoy...

1984 – A classic styled text-based adventure in the mould of the Zork games to fit the ‘eighties premise, game play is somewhat hampered by the adherence to the novel’s “newspeak”. This reductionist language is propagated by the Big Brother state and is designed to limit the vocabulary and hence prevent the population from being able to express their grievances. Innit. Therefore overstep the mark in your textual interactions with the world and you’ll be convicted of thoughtcrime and spend the rest of the game in Room 101 wearing a hat made of rats...

A Christmas Carol – Dickens’ festive favourite has it all – mist-shrouded London streets and a protagonist terrorised by creatures from the beyond to give us gaming’s first Christmas-themed survival horror.

The Castle – In Kafka’s critique on the nature of bureaucracy the protagonist’s attempts to gain access to the administrator known as Klamm within the titular Castle become a nightmare of red-tape and repetitive process. The term Kafkaesque is a perfect label for the maddeningly difficult platformers of the 8-bit era so this Manic Miner clone is infuriating and utterly unrewarding - particulalry since once the player completes the one and only screen he or she finds themselves transported right back to the start. Ad infinitum.

GTA Bateman – Rock Star North is back with the latest post- post-(and possibly post again) modern instalment of the Grand Theft Auto series. This time it brings amoral Yuppie Patrick Bateman (from Brett Easton Ellis’ notorious American Psycho) to a stylised version of New York City, where the sex, drugs and violence are played out to ironic ‘eighties soundtrack... Thinking about it haven’t they already made that one?

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I’m a Jez

I’ve never been an Apple person, but don’t get me wrong I love its products. The iBook is a multimedia dream machine, the staff at its shiny outlets are knowledgeable and helpful – the fact they’re in retail is a bit weird really - and the iPhone is clearly the best smartphone on the market by some margin. So let’s get that out of the way before the Mac fan-boys (and I suspect girls to a lesser extent) declare a digital jihad on me.

With all this praise I suppose the it would be a fair question to ask why won’t I take a bite of the Apple? In short, other than the prices I don’t really know, it’s all a bit culty though isn’t it… and Apple devotees are often just a little too smug - need proof just look this ad:



Since this campaign aired Microsoft has felt compelled to respond with its own series of (ever so cool) “I’m a PC” ads featuring a host of international celebs. It needn’t have bothered since the “Mac” character in Apple’s own efforts is a phenomenal piece of miscasting by its ad agency. Clearly they wanted to riff off UK audiences’ familiarity with the odd couple pairing of Mitchell and Webb in “Peep Show”, however what they failed to notice was just what a dim and wholly self-satisfied loser Robert Webb plays in the show. Now when I hear “I’m a Mac” what this translates itself into is “I’m a Jez”.

However, following on from my recent post on casual gaming I felt it the time was right to dip my toe into iTunes, so armed with an iPod Touch I decided to take the plunge. Will the iPod live up to its billing as the top hand-held on the market?

The iPod Touch certainly does have lots going for it as a gaming device, the 3D graphics are impressive although I’m not convinced by the claims that it outperforms the Nintendo Wii. However the pricing on the App store is far more competitive than I’d ever expect from our Japanese friends – I’ve never seem games priced at 59p before and with the likes of FlightControl on offer it’s worth considering as a games machine.

However, the killer app for me has to be the video, and here’s a top tip – download the Real SP beta from Realplayer, it allows you to simply download videos straight from the web… Perhaps a legal grey area but lets wash over that for the time being... Once you’ve got the file you can convert it to play on the iPhone/iTouch with a minimum of fuss – and it’s free, so can’t say fairer than that!

However in terms of usability for gaming when it comes to anything more complex than Sudoku the controls really do let the iPod Touch down. May be it’s my problem but I really need a control stick or a d-pad because a) I feel really daft on the train tilting the handset left and right like a boss-eyed drunk trying to read a pamphlet and b) smudging… The touch screen interface really annoys me, the IPod Touch has a great screen upon which I enjoy watching videos but even after a short gaming session the screen is invariably covered in finger prints and greasy smudges. So until Apple releases some sort of DS-type stylus the only solution I can see is to grow Nosferatu-style talons.

One of my most dreaded home entertainment scenarios is the combination of buttery-fingered toddlers and the flat screen TV that they seem to be attracted to like moths to a flame. It’s a lose/lose situation, in the worst case scenario the child ends up flattened by a falling LCD, the second option is smeary screen, this is obviously less bad but still aggravating. Honestly, I can’t blame the kid but parents – come on, it really isn’t that endearing that your child wants to be one with the pretty shapes?!

Clearly the tech industry seems to think we all want to be in Star Trek since touch screen is threatening to become a valid interface on anything that has a screen. When OLED screens become a standard will we really want to befoul them with our finger grease - perhaps it’s time to re-evaluate the merits the humble projector?

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