This week I choose to do my gaming blog on "Too Many Cooks" by Trevor Elkington which describes media convergence and self defeating adaptations. I agree with most parts of this article and I have learned a few things about this particular market place after reading it, but there are a couple of key ideas that I could not fully accept. In this article Elkington describes how gamers do not accept these games because of their heavy reliance on cut-scenes. I would have to disagree with this idea because as a gamer most of the time I dislike these games because of the "brand new" half-baked control schemes that the developers create. So every time that people play a game they must change the way that they think and percieve the game in order to have a successful gaming experience. This comes to my first point which is that these games need to use tried-and-true control schemes (such as Halo for an FPS, Starcraft/Warcraft for an RTS, "Zelda" for an RPG etc...) so that the developers can then focus on improving the storyline, which could give gamers a promising game experience. Sometimes these adaptations can be better than their movie counterparts because they used a control scheme that was pieced together by using ideas that could be parallelled to many other games, and they are then able to build on the film's storyline, perhaps making an entire universe for the gamer to explore.
The game I chose to play was X-Men Origins:Wolverine which is the storyline and the extension storyline from the film. I found this game as a demo on Xbox Live so I only played the first level of the game but I had positive feelings for the game. I did not get to see many cut-scenes during the first play through but the ones that were included in the demo were very short and allowed the story to unfold easily. fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuukkjgfjthdrsre!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! After playing the demo I reflected on the control scheme and decided that it was really well done and that I could see parallels to games such as Starwars: The Force Unleashed and The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction and that the developers actually improved many of these things for today's audience. Other than a few targeting failures I would say that this game is very fun and that the gameplay mechanics would be easy to pick-up and play for any gamer. I think that because myself as the gamer did not need to worry about understanding horrible gameplay mechanics within this particular game meant that I was able to focus on the storyline, which described the film's storyline in much greater detail, allowing me to gain a nurtured incite into the entire Wolverine story.
This is a picture from the opening scene of the game.
