Who blogs here:
Erik spends his night and weekends saving worlds, slaying beasts and organizing mismatch shapes into straight lines. While First-person shooters (FPS),
survival horror and platformers are some of his favorite, there are no genre of game he won't play. From PC to PSP, Xbox to Wii. Erik is just as passionate
with playing games as he is talking about them.
J.R. is the sorta-completionist gamer. He almost always completes the main story arc in all games he plays, but seldom plays the "gamer's game" to complete everything. He'll never get all 120 stars or fight Emerald Weapon, but he will save the day. His favorite genres are RPG, Action/Adventure, Platformer, and MMO. He doesn't like fighting games and is rather picky about FPSs.
Ted has been hooked on gaming since the birth of the Atari 2600, when high fantasy adventure consisted of maneuvering a colored square through a castle maze while dodging pesky dragons that looked like 2D seahorses with beaks and wacky bats that took great pleasure in stealing your keys. To this day, while he enjoys platformers, first-person shooters and puzzlers, he is most passionate about RPGs and any other games which weave great stories into the overall experience.
Amethyst, a gamer that giggles at calling herself a gamer because she fits none of the glamorous stereotypes of female gamers, has been gaming since her father brought home the sparkly new Nintendo Entertainment System back in '89. Up until then she had dabbled with the Atari at a cousin's, but it was Super Mario Brothers, Duck Hunt and pounding with her hands on the Power Pad in World Class Track Meet that sealed her fate. Despite a three year stint that she doesn't talk about, she has been playing video games and other nerdly activities with enthusiasm. She enjoys puzzlers, RPGs, MMORPGs, certain shooters/fighters, platformers, magic carpet rides and um, mechanical pencil sharpeners. She hates, despite a couple of exceptions, racing games and sports games. Amethyst is married to Erik and is friends with J.R. and Ted.
Tom Clancy did it. Don't you want to, too?
Amethyst
| 6/20/2008 1:17 pm |
Game On
I'm reading "The Talisman" by Stephen King and I wondered if any of his books have been made into video games. A story or two could be in a similar style of game like "Phantasmagoria" or "Alone in the Dark".
While doing a Google-search, I was reminded of an article King had recently written for Entertainment Weekly. (I liked the article but that's no surprise. Yay for big name defending often attacked genres.) In the beginning of the article King states he's no fan of video games. Which is perhaps why the only game-like experience I could find in my search was "Stephen King's F13"; a package containing "screamsavers", "deathtops", 3 mini-games and a novella. Amazon.com review describes the mini-games thusly:
"The program is largely disappointing. It has been argued that the most critical element of horror media is sound, and F13 does have a cornucopia of chilling and ominous noises. However, everything else is carefully honed to a PG level of taste--rather than being scary, or even creepy, most aspects of F13 fall into the category of horror camp. Two of the three minigames are simple twitch games. In Bug Splat, you flatten insects messily before they can overwhelm your screen; in Whack-A-Zombie, you dispatch the undead with a shovel. The third game, No Swimming, lets you feed various animals to a school of piranha. The games are hilarious, especially Whack-A-Zombie. They're not very challenging, though, and definitely not fear-inspiring."
I'm sure he's been approached by many with this idea. I'm not going to speculate as to why it hasn't happened or if it ever will, but I'd like to think that even a non-fan of video games can appreciate the story telling strength video games have. I hope that King and other authors' wait until a production house with a careful eye towards game play and a loving hand approach them so their properties can remain authentic and strong. They don't even have to wait until some far off, technologically marvelous time. (See: Parasite Eve, one of my all time favorite games created in 1998.)
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