How Retro Games are Still Crucial to the Gaming Market

A video game-themed window blinded designed by the UK-based Direct Blinds featuring controllers and handhelds of all shapes and sizes in the shape of Pac Man.

When a video game gets critical acclaim and player praise or a brand new console is released, there are usually two-fold expectations: (1) a sequel gets made that would expand on certain aspects of the original and (2) a new game that is released on a next generation console, be it a sequel, a prequel, a remake of that original game, or even one that would reboot a franchise, takes advantages of the console's more advanced hardware to make refined gameplay, better graphics, a new soundtrack, better storytelling, . By that logic, new games are supposed to be better than old ones. Throughout video game history, there have been games that meet, and sometimes even surpass, those expectations. The first sequel to Street Fighter not only surpassed the original, it also founded the fighting game genre. The first Resident Evil, originally released on the Sony Playstation in 1996, received a technical and graphical makeover on the Nintendo GameCube in 2002, making it one of the most atmospheric horror titles of all time. When Metroid Prime, a first-person action adventure title for Nintendo's Metroid franchise, was first announced, there was much skepticism as to whether or not the Western developed title (that developer being Texas based Retro Studios) would be true to the franchise. When it was released in 2002 on the GameCube, Metroid Prime had literally blown away expectations, garnering enough positive reviews and sales to become a critically acclaimed trilogy. At this year's recent San Diego Comic Con event, there have been announcements of remakes for two underrated classic games that are most memorable as classic ports for the Sega Genesis: Delphine International Software's Flashback (an IP now currently held by Ubisoft and which has just been released for the Xbox Live Arcade) and Capcom's Strider. From the gameplay footage I have watched so far, these two remakes seem to promise to stick to the roots of what made the original games great while incorporating new gameplay mechanics that enchance the experiences.

What Does it Mean For Video Games To Grow Up?

To those who have read my post on the escapist aspect of video games, I feel that I have not been specific enough in addressing a crucial gaming-related issue I have presented in that post. I raise the issue again here with these questions: what does it mean for video games to 'grow up?' Should 'growing up' entail upping the ante in violence, blood, gore, cursing, and sex? Does it require an exponentially increased number of cinematic cutscenes and quick-time events (QTEs) as well as greatly extended the length to a point that interactivity on part of the player is limited to a few button presses? Is it merely a justification for spending millions upon billions of dollars on making the game world and its inhabitants appear and feel as realistic as possible, as if realism is the one and only art style? The short answer to the last three counts would have to be no. Although there is no simple answer the original question, my own answer would be to have developers and producers of video games to do three things: to have more mature forms of storytelling, to discard all of the outdated storytelling tropes that offend and alienate people of different genders, races, religions, ethnics, and sexual orientation; and to hire new programmers, designers, artists, from these aforementioned demographics that would open new avenues of game development including design and storytelling. In order to understand how this relates to video games growing up, I will be summarizing the overall narratives of two video games, each from different generations in terms of content that justifies the M-rating and the sort of maturity that lies beneath the digital surface: Duke Nukem 3D and Bioshock Infinite.

A Greater Need for Diversity in the Video Game Industry and Culture

Since time immemorial, men have often viewed women as innocent, frail, and desirable objects. Throughout history, stories and art done by men tend to be a reflection those beliefs. Cases in point include the ancient Greek myth Andromeda, the medieval fairy tale Snow White, Jacques-louis David's The Oath of the Horatii, and Adolphe William Bouguereau's Nymphs and Satyr. Enter the 21st century and video games. By now, views of women have changed. Yet the way in which women are depicted and represented in mass media and popular culture have continued to cling to the ancient and by-now outdated views of women in spite of the social reforms instigated in the United States, Japan, and other progressive nations. This is also the unfortunate case with video games.

Fan Films: The Very Best Video Game Movies

When video games receive film adaptations, they have a tendency to be looked upon by critics and fans alike as inferior to the source material, box office records notwithstanding. They range from Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter of the 1990s to the Uwe Boll's House of the Dead, Bloodrayne, and Alone in the Dark in the 2000s. The Resident Evil movie saga starring Milla Jovovich did not fair well critically either, despite receiving millions of dollars at the box office. To make up for these disappointments, people have started to turn toward the Internet for something better, something more true to what made video games earn a fan base in the first place. Enter fan films, short independent non-profit videos made exclusively for the Internet. The number of views these videos receive reflects how well the creators hit the right notes in translating the worlds depicted in the video games to the short films. If they are lucky, they would be receiving support and endorsement from the companies that develop and produce the games the fan films are based on. If they are even luckier, those companies would hire them. As examples of such successful fan films, here is a short list:

Street Fighter: Legacy

Made by an independent company known as Streetlight Films, this short film was co-directed by Joey Ansah and Owen Trevor, with Jon Foo and Christian Howard respectively staring as Ryu and Ken, the two main characters of Street Fighter, Capcom's popular fighting game franchise. Being Street Fighter fans themselves, they took the fighting styles, particularly as depicted in Street Fighter IV, to heart when doing the fight choreography. Since being uploaded on YouTube less than three years ago, views have reached around 4 million, with comments saying that this fan adaptation is superior to the 1994 Hollywood adaptation staring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Raul Julia and the arguably far worse Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li released in 2009.

Street Fighter X Tekken: The Devil Within

Uploaded around the time Street Fighter X Tekken was released by Capcom last year, the theme in this film is that of powerful dark forces hidden within souls in the forms of the Satsui no hadou in Street Fighter's Ryu and the Devil Gene in Tekken's Kazuya Mishima and Jin Kazama. While the film revolved around battles between Ryu, Ken, and Kazuya and did not feature Jin until the very end, the people behind the fight choreography made sure that the different fighting styles of characters from two different fighting franchises as well as their personalities are represented accurately.


Portal: No Escape

Created and directed by Dan Trachtenberg, this unique short film is based on Portal, Valve's science fiction puzzle platformer. With expertise in digital graphics, special effects, and computer generated imagery (CGI), Trachtenberg's team had replicated the portal gun and the portal system from the game with fantastic results, something that is not easy for a fan film maker to pull off. Otherwise, his short yet technologically innovative fan film would not have been able to receive 12 million views.

Mortal Kombat: Rebirth

When this short film was first released on the Internet, few people knew what to make of it. As views climbed in the millions, some theorized that it was a trailer for a new film while others believed that it was a promotion for a new game. Both theories were odd given the fact that there hasn't been a single film release since the infamous Mortal Kombat: Annihilation and that the Mortal Kombat reboot was already released with critical and commercial success. It was later revealed that Kevin Tancharoen, whose career consisted of dance and musicals like 2009's Fame, was behind it's creation. He stated that he wanted to share his vision of what a Mortal Kombat movie would be like and to prove that, given enough resources, he can make it a reality. And sure enough, Warner Bros. hired him to officially write and direct the movie for them, as well as the first season of Mortal Kombat: Legacy, which was launched on the Machinima last year, with a combined 4 billion views, a feat that is unprecedented for an Internet based show. It is not known when Tancharoen's Mortal Kombat movie will be released, so season two of Mortal Kombat: Legacy will most likely be released sometime this year as a sort of hold over until then.

Escape from City 17 Parts 1 and 2

Made in mid 2009 by David and Ian Purchase of Toronto Canada (known professionally as the Purchase Brothers), this short film series is based on Valve's popular and critically acclaimed sci-fi first-person shooter Half-Life 2. More specifically, the series focuses on events during the later part of the game as well as its follow-up Half-Life 2: Episode 1 from the perspective of a few resistance fighters engaging in an uprising against the omnipotent alien Combine forces in the crumbling futuristic dystopia City 17. With previous experience filming Coca-Cola commercials, they made the film in a guerrilla style with no crew, a budget of $500 in Canadian dollars, costumes, used/broken airsoft guns, a previously owned HVX200 camera, and donated/previously owned software. When Valve Software, the developer and publisher of the Half-Life series, took notice and decided to get involved in the brothers' promotion of their film by having it premiere on the company's user community channel, Steam News. Upon seeing it, members said that they were 'blown away.' When Escape from City 17 - Part 1 was uploaded on YouTube in October 2009, it was viewed more that 1.5 million times in three days, then 2 million times in a week, and finally becoming the #1 Top Rated video on YouTube for about a month. Two years later, Part 2, made under half the budget as Part 1. With sound effects lifted directly from the game, the perfect replications of outfits worn by resistance fighters and Combine soldiers, and a story not featuring Gordon Freeman, the main protagonist of the series, standing out on its own, Escape from City 17 stands out as one of the most popular and well known films made by Half-Life fans.

Left 4 Dead Parts 1, 2, and 3

Based on Valve's popular multiplayer zombie shooter, this three-part fan film was started in 2010 by Colin and Conner McGuire (known on YouTube as ColinandConner). This home project took around two years to complete, with a limited budget. Part 1 lasts around six minutes; Part 2 lasts around fifteen; and Part 3 lasts around forty minutes, which brings the total of the whole project to an hour, the length of a standard episode for a TV show. While keeping the concept of a group of survivors fighting against hordes of zombies, each part got closer to the source material in terms of the objectives the characters set in accordance with their circumstances, such as getting a mint cola from a baseball arena for a pilot in exchange for an escape on his helicopter. With a combination of around fifteen million views, the three-part Left 4 Dead fan film is among the most successful.

While it is true that there are many fan films that are of lesser quality, the growing popularity of Internet-exclusive movies based on video games and made by independent film makers with a passion for their favorite video games is undeniable. Perhaps in the near future, the game and film companies would follow the examples set by these fan films, leading them to make better quality movies for the theaters while being respectful to both video game fans and the source material. I admit that this may be a naive prediction, but that prediction would be something most gaming fans are willing to look forward to.

Video Game Chronicles/Street Fighter

[Originally published 3/24/13. Updated 5/24/15. This update focused on rearranging the images intended to improve the flow of reading. Recent information regarding Ultra Street Fighter IV and Street Fighter V has been incorporated. This post had to be reverted to a draft in order to make this update possible.]

Fighting games: a video game genre that's puts players in the shoes of a variety of fighters. Men, women, cyborgs, supernatural beings, and aliens with different styles of martial arts, different weapons, different abilities, and various levels of skill from all over the world, or different realms and planets, gather compete in tournaments in order to achieve fame, fortune, glory, revenge, redemption, power, and enlightenment, as well as other reasons. The names of the games are many: Tekken, Mortal Kombat, King of Fighters, Soul Caliber, Samurai Shodown, Guilty Gear, Virtua Fighter, Darkstalkers, Dead or Alive, Killer Instinct, Super Smash Bros., the list goes on. Each one of these has its own flavor and play style yet they all have one rule: only one will make it on top. To most of the casual gaming crowd, fighting games are just like any other game they play on arcade cabinets and on consoles in their living rooms. To a majority of hardcore gamers, the fighting genre is a sport as evident in yearly EVO Championship events. Fueled by tsunamis of quarters and trash talk, the fighting game genre as a whole owes it all to one fighting franchise that made all this possible and it is anyone's guess as to how it would turn out if it never made its appearance in arcades: Street Fighter.

Escapism and Maturity in Video Games

(Note: This post is one of two posts that were originally posted three days prior on The Voice of Heard. I reposted them here as start-up entries and as an attempt to make them accessible to a wider audience with The Escapist's Realm.)

Every day, we all go through some form of daily routine in our lives, which include taking responsibilities for ourselves. We work at our jobs to make a living; we support our families by buying food for the table, paying our taxes, etc; we spend our mornings, afternoons, and sometimes evenings studying in school; at home, we clean our rooms, our cars, and sometimes our whole houses; we work on assignments for the schools we study in and/or the jobs we work in, which is also usually at home; the list of our responsibilities goes on and varies from individual to individual. Once we get those responsibilities done, and until we would inevitably have to deal with more, we have a few hours or more to ourselves; we would have a break from our routines, a moment to unwind and have some peace of mind. Many would call this leisure, spare time in which we could do anything for our pleasure and to relieve ourselves of the stress that results from the responsibilities had to deal with. We could spend that time doing anything that suits our interests, like reading a book (such as a work of nonfiction, novel, comic book, etc.), watching TV (be it something on broadcast or on a DVD or Blu-Ray, like a TV series or a movie), or playing a video game. By doing activities like these, we immerse ourselves in other worlds we could find enjoyable to observe or interact in. Some of those worlds are similar to the one we live and breathe in but are not entirely real while others are, for lack of better words, entirely made up. This sort of activity is an escape from the responsibilities and routines of our everyday lives; in short, it is escapism, the subject of this entry.

From G4 TV to the Esquire Channel: A Missed Opportunity for a Video Game Channel

(Note: This post is one of two posts that were originally posted three days prior on The Voice of Heard. I reposted them here as start-up entries and as an attempt to make them accessible to a wider audience with The Escapist's Realm.)

In recent years, the video game industry and community has experienced both good news and bad news. But no bad news is more significant than the recent announcement that G4 TV, a television channel originally geared towards a young gamer audience, is to become the Esquire Network, which is geared toward a more "sophisticated meterosexual male" audience, by late April this year. (Note: the term 'meterosexual' is used to describe an urban modern-day heterosexual man who is mostly concerned [and perhaps even obsessed] with his personal appearance, which is reflected by the amount of time and money spent on the most fashionable clothes, the best beauty treatments, and the most fastidious grooming his money can buy.) In order to paint a clearer picture as to why this is happening, I will give a brief history of G4.