At one time, Microsoft was in Hollywood, meeting with movie producers and trying to make a Halo movie. It didn’t happen. And while Microsoft hasn’t given up, the question remains: More »
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Film
Someone has gone to the trouble of concocting a fake trailer for a live-action Pokemon movie, complete with in-progress watermarks and surprisingly decent special effects. More »
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Kirby’s Epic Yarn looks amazing, because, well, it’s a game that’s made out of yarn, and that changes EVERYTHING. But while we’ve all been gushing over what that means for the supercute graphics and the innovative world-manipulating gameplay, we’ve all been content to say “that’s a neat idea,” and nobody has bothered to stop and ask Nintendo “Hey, why did you guys turn Kirby into yarn anyway?” So Jim Sterling of Destructoid asked Nintendo exactly that.
According to Nintendo, the idea came from the developers at Good-Feel (the team behind Kirby’s Epic Yarn as well as Wario Land: The Shake Dimension), who got the idea from a Japanese stop-motion film made out of yarn. However, nobody at Nintendo or Good-Feel actually remembers the title of the film in question. Ouch, what an anticlimactic revelation! Somewhere, possibly lost in the annals of Japanese stop-motion film history, is the movie that inspired the new look of the classic cream puff.
We’ve got 47 days before the game comes out on October 17th. Anybody want to go on a quest to Japan to find the film before then?
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Mike Newell, the pretentious-looking old guy pictured and director of such classic films as [sarcasm alert, s**theads] Mona Lisa Smile and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, along with Harry Potter and Goblet of Fire and the quite good Four Weddings and a Funeral, doesn’t like games much. They “bore the arse” off him, in fact. And when he sat down with CVG to discuss his PoP movie, well, it didn’t go well.
“When people watch 24, they’re watching for the surprise, you know – when is the great big bad surprise going to step out from behind the palm tree. When they watch The Wire, they’re watching the human drama of it.
“You can’t do it without the human drama. And the video game cannot do that. The video game can do all sorts of face-pulling, all sorts of: ‘I am a bad man, I have a mean jagged sword,’ but it can’t do any more than that.”
Sigh. Just shut up.
Sadly, he does manage to accidentally make a good point about violence in games as he speaks about his gamer son.
“And I know, when I look at my 14-year old’s glazed eyes, that killing 3,000 Brazilians doesn’t mean anything, really.”
He’s saying that shooting hundreds of human enemies over the course of a story-based game can undermine the game’s drama, but he’s too ill-informed to explore this idea with any real thought. Leave this discussion to the adults, Mike. You need to stay at the kid’s table.
Many more weirdly angry comments over at CVG.
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Director Guillermo del Toro, known for his films including Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy, has signed a deal to develop multiple games with an unspecified “big company,” and plans to announce the titles in the coming weeks. “We’re going to do games that are going to be technically and narratively very interesting,” del Toro told MTV news in an interview this week. “We’re announcing it in the next few weeks,” he said. “It’s not a development …
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Here we go again. Another Hollywood type doesn’t think that video games can, or ever will be able to elicit true human emotion in the way film does. Instead of Roger Ebert this time, however, we have someone who’s actually involved in video games to some extent. Mike Newell, director of the Harry Potter movies and this summer’s Prince of Persia film adaptation says video games “bore the ass” off of him.
Speaking with CVG, the director asserts that most video game movies end up being rubbish because film makers try too hard to cater to the wants of gamers. With Prince of Persia he tried to remove the film as far from the game source material as he could and make a compelling drama around it.
“God *** the gamers!," exclaimed Newell. “Get them out of my head! The Prince Of Persia movie is a great big, general entertainment with a romance, a boy and a girl, comedy, action and a very good melodramatic story. It should be enormous, free reign entertainment. That's what a Bruckheimer movie is, and that's what this tries to do.”
He also admits that he has no real skill at video games, so his personal experience with them has been limited.
“I'm entirely incompetent at playing video games,” admits Newell. “In the Prince Of Persia game, you have to run across walls – I could never get more than three feet without falling into the revolving knives. I was hopeless.”
It’s rather interesting to have a director making a film based off a video game he admits not having much love for. Would we want someone handling a World of Warcraft or Halo movie who had this position?
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