If you haven’t seen the video to Michelle Osorio’s “Me and my Companion Cube” yet, you’re probably doing the internet wrong.
QUOTED FOR TRUTH - Bitmob, Jason Lomberg: Video-game movies and the hypocrites who reward mediocrity [June 17th, 2011]
I’ve been saying exactly this for years. The epitome of this, to me, is when New Line snapped up the movie rights to Gears of War. Honest to Glod, Gears of fucking War, a game constructed almost entirely of plot points, characters and narrative borrowed entirely from popular films in the scifi-action genre. The idea of turning Gears into a movie is such a preposterous one that my brain literally cannot fathom how anybody outside of the guys at The Asylum would think it anything other than a terrible, terrible idea.
But a Gears movie would probably make bank. Why? For the reasons outlined in Jason’s article - we trash game movies, but we flock to the theaters to see them. Why do we do that? Some misguided sense of loyalty? Fuck, I don’t know.
The Technology Barrier
As technology has progressed over the years and as games consoles become more sophisticated and complex, games are better-looking and more innovative than they’ve ever been. But a problem nags at me. It’s been nagging at me for some time, and it’s all down to Square-Enix.
For years there have been rumours of a potential remake of Final Fantasy VII circulating around the tronterwebs. These rumours are unsubstantiated and baseless, but that doesn’t stop the gaming press from trotting the rumours out every now and then for the pageviews (PSX Extreme’s Head Bullshitter and Fanboy-in-Chief Ben Dutka has been harping on about the non-existent project for years). The fact is that remaking Final Fantasy VII with modern technology simply isn’t viable - a game of that size would take much longer to develop now than it would have done in the 90s.
“But why?” I pretend to hear you ask. “Surely it shouldn’t take them too long. In fact it should be quicker now, if anything.” Wrong. Better technology means that more time and care needs to go in to making the assets, to putting the game together and making it sparkle and shine on par with other games coming out today. For that reason a FFVII remake would take far longer to develop than the original, and for that reason it’s simply not going to happen.
That’s no great loss to me - I’m not a fan of the series with the exceptions of VI and IX, both games that are far more deserving of a remake than VII - but it is a sign of a potential problem game designers face today. Simply put, building a game of the size and scope of VII with today’s technology is prohibitive. It’s no surprise that games today are, generally speaking, a lot shorter, or at least feature notably smaller game worlds. Portal, for instance, is an incredibly innovative and utterly brilliant game, but playing it I couldn’t help but feel that if it had been developed as a 2D game during the 90s that it might have featured more than two-dozen puzzles.
The more advanced technology gets, the longer it takes to develop games because the more involved the process of producing assets for a game becomes. Ultimately that’s our loss - a modern-day Cannon Fodder wouldn’t have half as many missions as its predecessors and, judging from the screenshots that appeared of the long-since-cancelled PSP version a few years ago, wouldn’t have looked anywhere near as gorgeous.
So what’s the solution here? Well, you could par things back and keep things simple. It’s worked for indie titles such as Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV. Unfortunately that take doesn’t always work, especially when you’re trying to tell a realistic future-war story about alien bugs who aren’t really bugs or aliens. It’s a dilemma.
