Games to Play on Halloween

The best holiday is coming up in only a week, and if you're looking to get hyped for Halloween, the only thing better than a cheesy horror movie is a spooky video game. I'm going to list a few of my favorites here, in no particular order.

Of course, the most obvious can go first.

Resident Evil

I'm not sure what to say about the series as a whole. The franchise itself is nothing short of legendary, but I wasn't fond of the prequel Resident Evil Zero, and I've heard bad things about both of the most recent releases, Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City and Resident Evil 6. This shouldn't be a surprise; any series that stays around as long as this one has is bound to go sour at some point. I did, however, enjoy the hell out of the GameCube remake of the original. It was the first Resident Evil game I ever owned, and on my first playthrough, it scared the crap out of me.

The controls were awful, as they were in every installment in the series prior to Resident Evil 4. The pairing of character-relative controls and fixed camera angles is truly one of the worst things ever to happen to video games — but I have to say that it did, in a pretty stupid way, make the game scarier. Avoiding or shooting a small number of slow-moving zombies probably doesn't sound like a frightening ordeal to anyone who plays the likes of Left 4 Dead, but with such clumsy controls, what would be a walk in the park becomes a nightmare. The character turns too slowly, and aiming for the head involves more luck than skill. The camera angles are uniformly bad, as well. It's frustrating, but effective at making the player feel helpless even with a gun.

What makes Resident Evil most effective, however, is that it doesn't rely on cheap "jump scares" to startle the player. The game is scary because of its expert control of suspense, because you don't know what's around the next corner, and because you don't know how much ammunition you can spare. It's the definitive survival horror, and it does almost everything right. As far as horror games on the GameCube go, the Resident Evil remake is second only to...

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem

I've already written quite a lot about Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, another GameCube masterpiece. It's not the scariest game I've ever played — not even close — but it's got a creepy atmosphere, a fantastic story, and some clever gameplay mechanics.

Eternal Darkness is a psychological horror, so it's a bit more subtle and slow-paced than most other horror games, which tend rely on sudden, loud noises and simple shock value to scare the player. It's only going to startle you in a couple of places, and there isn't a lot of blood and gore, but the sanity system will do its best to freak you out in a variety of (occasionally hilarious) ways. More importantly, the game doesn't do a bad job of creating an overwhelming sense of impending doom.

Overall, it's a nice game to get you in the Halloween spirit, especially if you're a big fan of H. P. Lovecraft. And speaking of Lovecraft...

Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare

I almost didn't include this game on the list, but alas, the power of nostalgia is too great. It's been years since I played it, and I must admit that I never quite got to the end. Maybe I got stuck, maybe it was too hard, or maybe I was so creeped out by my first survival horror experience that I couldn't bear to go on. In any case, I was a lot younger at the time, and I wasn't as enthusiastic about PC games as I am now.

The New Nightmare is the 2001 sequel to the Lovecraft-inspired Alone in the Dark trilogy from the early 1990s — which, unfortunately, I've never had the pleasure of playing. (Or maybe it's more of a spin-off, since another sequel in 2008 apparently retcons The New Nightmare out of existence.) My memory of the plot is somewhat fuzzy, but what I do remember is that the game creeped me out more than a little. While I'm sure the graphics have aged poorly, I'd like to give the game another try, if I can ever find the discs.

The New Nightmare suffered from the same clunky controls that plagued the early Resident Evil games. And, like Resident Evil, it has two protagonists, takes place in a mansion, and involves a lot of puzzles. The similarities are hard to ignore, but there are some differences, namely the replacement of zombies, zombie-dogs, zombie-snakes, zombie-sharks, and zombie-birds with a slightly more creative variety of creepy crawlies, as well as the use of a flashlight to fend off the baddies. Actually, that last part kind of reminds me of...

Alan Wake

I wrote more than enough about Alan Wake in my earlier post on cinematic games, so if you're no stranger to this blog, you're probably aware that I enjoyed the game immensely. The transparently Stephen King-inspired psychological horror/action game earns its place on this list with a spooky atmosphere and a superb story. The two short DLC expansions, truth be told, were a bit weird, and I can't say I really enjoyed the sequel, Alan Wake's American Nightmare (of which the only redeeming quality, in the absence of a decent story, is the intense arcade mode), but the original game is definitely worth a try.

Like many horror games, it's not so scary once you get the hang of killing the bad guys, nor is it as thrilling once you know every plot twist and the location of every precious box of ammunition, but the first playthrough will have its share of potentially unnerving moments.

And those bad guys — whom, in the beginning of the game, consist largely of possessed, axe-wielding lumberjacks in the woods at night — can be really frightening. I think it's mostly in the way they move. Even when you dodge their attacks, you can almost feel the power behind every swing. The way they stumble when they miss, and the way Alan ducks out of the way just in time... there's a real sense of momentum that's absent in the awkwardly animated combat of a lot of video games.

Now just wait until you're surrounded by those guys, low on bullets, with a long way to run to the next safe haven. As in any good horror game, simply running away isn't an option. The bad guys are faster than you, and you can only escape them for as long as you can successfully dodge their attacks without running into a corner. At some point, you'll need to turn around and fight. The same is true of...

Killing Floor

Unlike every other game I've mentioned, Killing Floor is primarily a multiplayer game. In fact, you might say it's exclusively multiplayer, since playing the solo mode is essentially the same as going online and joining an empty server, and since playing alone isn't nearly as fun.

Generally, I prefer single-player games, but Killing Floor — a stand-alone game based on a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004 — has become one of my all-time favorites, for two reasons. The first is that it's cooperative. Up to six players team up against a horde of computer-controlled zombies, so unless someone makes a boneheaded move that inadvertently gets the whole team killed, there are no hard feelings between human players. For the most part, everyone you'll meet online is rather friendly. The second reason is that, unlike most multiplayer games, Killing Floor requires a lot of coordinated teamwork.

Forget about spooky ambiance and creepy music. Killing Floor is scary because it's hard. The easiest setting is a joke, but anything above that can be a serious challenge, depending on the collective skills of the team. And with the number of zombies in each wave increasing as more players join, there's little room for weak links. You need to be able to count on your team, and you need to keep them alive, because there's no worse feeling than being the last guy alive with a bunch of monsters chasing after you. Killing Floor is one of the least forgiving video games I've played in recent memory, and it's not for the faint of heart. But I love it. The only first-person shooter I've spent more hours playing is...

F.E.A.R.

Some would argue that F.E.A.R. falls flat on its face as a genuine horror game. It's got a somewhat spooky story, and occasionally you'll hear voices or see the ghost of a little dead girl, but there aren't a whole lot of monsters that jump out at you... at least, not for most of the game. But as a first-person shooter, F.E.A.R. excels and exceeds expectations. A horror-themed game doesn't need to make you crap your pants in order to be fun, and F.E.A.R. certainly is a lot of fun.

The enemy AI is very good; while the bad guys occasionally show their stupidity, they do attempt to flank you, and they're pretty good at flushing you out of hiding with grenades if they know where you are. The way they talk to each other while attempting to take you down also adds a lot of realism. The slow-motion feature, while a bit gimmicky, does add a little something extra to the gameplay, and is genuinely useful (perhaps too useful) even in the most dire of circumstances. The "scary parts" are all scripted, but if you're playing on the highest difficulty, the fear of being shot to death should keep you on the edge of your seat through most of the game.

There are two expansion packs and a couple of sequels, if you want more, but I don't have anything good to say about those. The story stopped making sense in the expansions (which were later retconned), and it became downright silly by the end of the first sequel. Also, be advised that the second sequel is meant to be played with two people. While there is a single-player campaign, it's really just cooperative mode without the second character, who mysteriously and nonsensically shows up nonetheless during cutscenes. If you just want to shoot things, go ahead and play the whole series, but don't expect any of the unanswered questions leftover from the first game to be adequately resolved. Speaking of great games with mediocre sequels...

Painkiller

A moderately fast-paced shooter with a demonic theme and an old-school style, Painkiller is easily one of the most solid purchases I ever made on Steam. The "Complete Pack" (which, at the time, included fewer games than it does now) was marked down to $4.99, and the first game alone is worth at least that much to me. The story is truly awful, and the voice acting is atrocious, but the gameplay is good enough to make up for that. Painkiller is pure; it's a first-person shooter without all the pointless fluff. It's nonstop carnage. It's all you could ask from a first-person shooter unless you really care about character development, and I know you don't.

If you're a fan of classic shooters like Doom, and more modern throwbacks like Serious Sam, this game is highly recommended. I enjoyed the first installment so much that I played through a couple of times before moving onto the others. Unfortunately, I soon came to realize that none of the other games in the series, thus far, were nearly as good — but by then I had already gotten my money's worth.

As of one week from today, there will be half a dozen standalone games in the Painkiller series, plus one expansion to the original, but there still hasn't been a Painkiller 2, or anything which might resemble a proper sequel. Worse yet, none of the continuations I've played have been worthwhile. Painkiller Overdose, apparently a fan-made mod that eventually became an official stand-alone expansion, was decent, but a step down from the original. Painkiller: Resurrection, which attempted a more open-world experience, was sloppy, buggy, and generally awful. Painkiller: Redemption, another fan-made mod that was turned into an official release, more closely followed the style of the previous titles, and was more enjoyable, but it was more of the same, at best. This is also what I expect of Painkiller: Recurring Evil, which I have yet to play. Then there's Painkiller: Hell & Damnation, which comes out on Halloween day, and while it looks promising, it seems mostly to be a (much prettier) remake of the original game.

To make a long story short, I highly recommend getting the first Painkiller, usually sold with its expansion as Painkiller: Black Edition, as soon as it goes on sale. The rest of the series is questionable. You might want to buy the Complete Pack, if you really love old-school shooters, but if you're not sure, you should probably stick with the first one for now. It's a great game to play on Halloween, and while it's easy to pick up and play, it requires some serious practice to master. (You'll want to learn how to bunny-hop, constantly, at all times, forever. The alternative is frustration and death.)

Video Games & Movies

Dozens of films inspired by video games have come and gone over the years, and they're rarely worth your time. It's for this reason that I was in no hurry to start "blogging" when I heard, a couple of weeks ago, that the (supposedly) upcoming Assassin's Creed movie had become a bit too real with the casting of an actual, famous, relevant actor, Michael Fassbender, for the lead role. Needless to say, I'm a bit late to this party.

So why bring it up now? Well, it seems to me that now is as good a time as any to discuss the making-movies-based-on-video-games trend in general, since we've all had plenty of time to process the latest news of this particular game-to-film adaptation. We've gone through the initial excitement of imagining some of our favorite characters appearing in a big-budget movie, the sobering realization that nearly all game-to-film conversions are mediocre at best and that the best part of the game was actually playing it, and perhaps a resurgence of hope that this movie could be the one that makes up for all the bad ones that came before. As for me, that last part might not apply. I'm finding myself increasingly confused by the absurdity of taking a concept designed for an interactive medium and translating it to a medium which involves no interaction whatsoever. It hardly ever works, but they keep doing it.

Might the plot from Assassin's Creed make a good movie? Sure. Will it add anything of value to the franchise? Only if it's more fun than watching someone play the game, and one could argue that a lot of video-game-inspired cash-grab movies fail this test.

Part of me wants to believe that an Assassin's Creed movie could work, but the rest of me knows how unlikely this is. It's not my intention to hate on any particular franchise or developer, but things didn't go so well the last time they tried to make a movie inspired by the story from an Ubisoft video game. Not even Jake Gyllenhaal could save Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which might have been okay for an action movie if only they had dropped the mind-numbingly obvious (and stupid) parallels to the Iraq War... and pretty much everything else in the script.

An uninteresting plot can be ignored amidst the special effects and gratuitous violence and perhaps a smoking-hot (I mean "talented") female actress, but a downright stupid plot is just too distracting and can ruin a movie entirely. Perhaps I was also a bit overly annoyed by the lack of resemblance between this movie and the video game I so enjoyed, but hey, I can't pretend to be unbiased. And why should I? Wasn't I the intended audience?

In all fairness, I suppose we should be glad that the writers of this Prince of Persia film hadn't decided to follow the storyline of its namesake with deadly precision, since that would necessitate killing all but three characters within the first five minutes, one of whom would then be absent for most of the story. In fact, like many video games (though, perhaps, mostly the older ones), Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time doesn't have very much "story" at all. What's there is very good, for a video game, but it's not enough (and not appropriate) for a full-length movie.

Sure, the game itself takes many hours to complete — there are tons of monsters to fight, some platforming puzzles to solve, and some character development via dialogue during the completion of those puzzles — but the important parts of the story are told through a few cutscenes which don't add up to a whole lot. Of course, they might have instead used the collective plot from the entire "Sands of Time trilogy" (encompassing the sequels Warrior Within and The Two Thrones) — in fact, the film they released did borrow minor elements from all three games — but the disjointed plot you would get by trying to fully combine these three stories probably wouldn't have made a very good film either.

All of this, however, makes me wonder why they ever decided to make a movie based on this game if the story would have to be changed to the point where the script hardly even resembled the source material. If not for the familiar title, as well as the fact that the time-travel-enabling device happens to be a dagger and the fact that the main character is a Persian prince (albeit an adopted one), I never would have guessed that the film was inspired by one of my favorite video games. Actually, given that the film was published by Disney and that the main character is street-rat-turned-royalty and receives magical powers from an ancient artifact, I might have assumed instead that it was some kind of re-imagining of Aladdin. Not even the character names would have given it away, since none of the names used in the film appeared in any of the Prince of Persia games. It almost seems ridiculous to keep the title.

But of course they're going to keep the title, because a movie based on a video game typically has no attractive qualities other than its association with a popular franchise. The only people who see these movies are fans of the respective video games, parents of those fans, other old people who don't know what they're getting themselves into, and, of course, girls who care more about the lead actor than the subject matter. ("Um, a video game? Whatever, nerd, I just want to see Jake Gyllenhaal's abs.") The first two groups are arguably the most important, so filmmakers continue to draw inspiration from video games even though these movies usually turn out to be garbage and subsequently draw ridicule upon the franchises from which they spawned. The movies don't need to be good; they just need to be good enough that you, the video game fan, purchase a non-refundable ticket. In other words, while the critics might scoff, it's a neat way to make a quick buck... that is, unless your name is Uwe Boll and you just produced and directed a film based on BloodRayne.

The fact that lots of people played a stupid video game with a sexy vampire doesn't mean a movie based on its characters and aesthetic will turn a profit, so it's all kind of risky. Unfortunately, coming up with an original idea is riskier, and more expensive. That's why so many of the movies released so far this millennium are one or more of the following:

1. an adaptation of a novel or short story,
2. an adaptation of a graphic novel or comic book,
3. an adaptation of a TV show or cartoon,
4. an adaptation of a video game,
5. an adaptation of a theatrical play or musical,
6. a sequel or "prequel" to a previous movie,
7. a remake or "reimagining" of a previous movie,
8. borderline plagiarism, or
9. crap.

Video game adaptations are particularly problematic because most would argue that the primary function of a video game, like any game, is to provide entertaining gameplay, rather than to tell a story. As such, most video games don't have awesome storylines, and that's okay if the games are still fun. What's so often substantially less than okay is taking a plot which exists solely for player motivation and using it as the inspiration for something that can't be played.

But we might, someday, see a genuinely good video-game-to-feature-film adaptation. After all, a lot of modern games are practically interactive movies already. Some video game fans will tell you that this is the end of "gaming" as we know it, but let's not get carried away just yet. While it's true that we often get stuck with less challenging, less sophisticated gameplay in exchange for a more "cinematic" experience, the industry has churned out a decent number of story-driven games which miraculously nail the winning combination of worthwhile gameplay and an engaging narrative.

Ironically, it's usually the heavily gameplay-driven titles, fun as hell to play but often lacking in depth, that end up having films named after them (see Doom). As a result, these films are mostly the trashy action/horror sort, which only sometimes do well at the box office and almost never do well with the critics. Why not make a movie out of a strongly story-driven game like Metal Gear Solid or Alan Wake or... Assassin's Creed?

Maybe it's finally happening.

Although it's too early to tell if the film will ever be made — a famous name attached to a project does not necessarily guarantee its completion — it's an interesting possibility. A film based on Assassin's Creed could actually follow the plot of the game rather closely without sucking. Furthermore, a film based on the Assassin's Creed franchise just makes a whole lot of sense. The publisher has already branched out into every medium they can afford to exploit. In addition to the five games that make up the core of the series, and a bunch of handheld/mobile spin-offs, they've released several books, some comics, a Facebook application, and even a few short films.

The irritating part is that some of these tie-ins occupy their own space in the series' alternate history, rather than simply re-telling or expanding the story from an existing game. It gives me the sense that I'm missing part of the expansive story if I don't check out all this peripheral stuff (including the one comic which was only printed in French). The film, if they're serious about making it, could be the same way. Rather than basing it on an existing game, they might instead stick it chronologically between two existing games, or give us a new story with a new protagonist and only subtle ties to the familiar story we've all been following. All we know so far is that Ubisoft wants to retain as much creative control as possible, which means they probably won't screw up their own canon.

In other words, it might be cool. Certainly it can't be worse than the short film Ubisoft made to promote the original game's first sequel.

I'm still not getting my hopes up, however, because the very thing that makes an Assassin's Creed feature film seem so natural is exactly what makes it kind of pointless. The game is "cinematic" enough. Modern video games, for the sake of becoming more mainstream, attempt to emulate movies, so creating a movie based on one accomplishes nothing but an upgrade of visual effects and the complete removal of interactivity. Films based on video games are primarily for the video games' fans, and fans of video games don't often wish they could experience a video game without actually having to play it. Playing it is the whole point. (Perhaps somewhere out there is a screenplay based on a game with an amazing story and horrible gameplay — a film adaptation of a game that should have been a film all along — but no one is going to see a movie based on a game that basically sucked.) The only way to make it worth watching is to make the story new and original, but then the fans will say they liked it better how it was.

When fans of a game care too much about the canon, a movie based on it is almost sure to fail in their eyes. Game-to-film adaptations are often despised by the game's fans for changes to the story and, more generally, for not living up to unrealistic expectations. Meanwhile, those unfamiliar with a game often don't care enough to see the film at all. It's for this reason that I'm always surprised by the few adaptations that actually do well (see, for example, Resident Evil... although I guess you can't go wrong with zombies).

Finally, whether the filmmakers appease the hardcore fans and create a faithful adaptation, or take a risk and try to improve upon the narrative, or do something completely off-the-wall and unrelated to the game (see Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within), they also have to deal with the fact that the film's association with a video game can easily do more harm than good. It might snag all the fans, but it might also alienate everyone else, namely the older audiences who think they're too grown-up for video games and, by extension, too sophisticated for such a movie. Then there's everyone else who didn't play the game, everyone who hates the game, et cetera.

But I hope for Ubisoft's sake that I'm just being pessimistic. Maybe all they need to make it work are good actors, good writers, and a good director. It's pretty clear that a lot of game-to-film adaptations have none of these things.