27th May 2004, 10:55 AM
I love Metal Gear Twin Snakes, but in reality it's overly simple gameplay from old arcade style ideas. So the gameplay in one respect is bland but, it's traditional and easy to grasp so in many respects it's quite good and because of that is easily converted in to a story. Metal Gear was most likely engineered around ideas, much like Resident Evil. In both series, they constantly pay homage to many different movies.
In one scene in Resident Evil it's very Aliens-like, from the lighting and what weapons are available to you, to the creatures and sound effects and even the art direction of the set you're playing on. But in another scene it will become Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead, then in another it becomes Frankenstein and then it turns in to the Matrix, and then it throws Mission Impossible scenes at you.
so basically you sit down and take scenes from movies; what scene in a movie would be awesome to see in a video game? How about where Ripley and Newt were trapped in the room with the Facehuggers? (That scene is in Resident Evil Code Veronica) so you build the story and character path so that the character will find themelves in a room similar to the scene in Aliens and you can play it out in an interactive form.
While this type of game is fun it can become bland very easily. In Metal Gear, I dunno about you, but I got really sick of Snake saying overly dramatic lines and then entering a room where music starts that sounds like the theme to Mission Impossible and has camera angles taken right from the movie (where the camera floats around showing you how the trap works and what you need to do to get past it). It's nostalgic and it makes for a fun idea but when you present original content it takes a totally different tone, it's serious. And it draws the gameplayer deeper in to the game.
Instead of "Oh I remember this scene from this movie" it becomes a more serious matter of "Oh krap what do I do?" and Resident Evil, Metal Gear and other games of its types rarely can do that. Silent Hill does it in spades. Every minute of the game is something more and more bizarre to the point that the gameplayer has no idea what to do. Being attacked by people in hospital beds hanging from the cieling... in the dark. You wont find a movie reference there, and that's just awesome. It's new, it's fresh and it's something you've never seen before and it's presented with an actual story that is in itself an original story. That's what all video games should have.. instead it's either brand new gameplay and a simple (trite) story or a brand new (good) story with overly simple play mechanics.
My whole take on it is that video games are not movies and they will never be movies. Movies are movies, games are games, and video games can do something movies will never be able to do and that's become fully interactive. Video games need their own story telling method; Multiple branches and different things that can happen every time you play. Every character you meet, can die. Every place you visit can be destroyed (or rebuilt) and the gameplayer chooses his path and creates the story as he plays - which can be different every time he plays depending on what he wants his character to be. That's the future of video games. True role playing games in that you create the character, instead of like in a film where the character is presented to you, you actually FORM it.
In one scene in Resident Evil it's very Aliens-like, from the lighting and what weapons are available to you, to the creatures and sound effects and even the art direction of the set you're playing on. But in another scene it will become Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead, then in another it becomes Frankenstein and then it turns in to the Matrix, and then it throws Mission Impossible scenes at you.
so basically you sit down and take scenes from movies; what scene in a movie would be awesome to see in a video game? How about where Ripley and Newt were trapped in the room with the Facehuggers? (That scene is in Resident Evil Code Veronica) so you build the story and character path so that the character will find themelves in a room similar to the scene in Aliens and you can play it out in an interactive form.
While this type of game is fun it can become bland very easily. In Metal Gear, I dunno about you, but I got really sick of Snake saying overly dramatic lines and then entering a room where music starts that sounds like the theme to Mission Impossible and has camera angles taken right from the movie (where the camera floats around showing you how the trap works and what you need to do to get past it). It's nostalgic and it makes for a fun idea but when you present original content it takes a totally different tone, it's serious. And it draws the gameplayer deeper in to the game.
Instead of "Oh I remember this scene from this movie" it becomes a more serious matter of "Oh krap what do I do?" and Resident Evil, Metal Gear and other games of its types rarely can do that. Silent Hill does it in spades. Every minute of the game is something more and more bizarre to the point that the gameplayer has no idea what to do. Being attacked by people in hospital beds hanging from the cieling... in the dark. You wont find a movie reference there, and that's just awesome. It's new, it's fresh and it's something you've never seen before and it's presented with an actual story that is in itself an original story. That's what all video games should have.. instead it's either brand new gameplay and a simple (trite) story or a brand new (good) story with overly simple play mechanics.
My whole take on it is that video games are not movies and they will never be movies. Movies are movies, games are games, and video games can do something movies will never be able to do and that's become fully interactive. Video games need their own story telling method; Multiple branches and different things that can happen every time you play. Every character you meet, can die. Every place you visit can be destroyed (or rebuilt) and the gameplayer chooses his path and creates the story as he plays - which can be different every time he plays depending on what he wants his character to be. That's the future of video games. True role playing games in that you create the character, instead of like in a film where the character is presented to you, you actually FORM it.