Tag: videogame adaptation

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John Carpenter’s The Thing refuses to change shape

The Thing is one of the most peculiar media series to try and wrap your head around. For starters, as far as series go, it struggles to qualify, mostly orbiting John Carpenter’s 1982 film, with a small and loose assemblage of multimedia offshoots (a comic series, a prequel film) dancing at the edges of its gravity. You could argue that the series itself resembles its titular namesake: an amorphous entity that devours and impersonates the characteristics of its predecessor; each incarnation a diminishing return of success. Part of the difficulty in capitalizing on The Thing’s clout through serialization is the…
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Fire Dance With Me turns Twin Peaks into an everlasting jive

Of the many peculiar clues that the dwarf in the Black Lodge gives Agent Cooper throughout Twin Peaks, dancing is one of them. Not just any dance, an awkward 1940s-style jazz step with a machine-like sway and disjointed rhythm, all of it operating from the elbows and shoulders as if his arms had minds of their own. Due to being given this clue at the beginning of the series, every time someone started dancing in the show, we sucked in air and wondered if that scene would tell us something more about the murder of Laura Palmer. This is what…
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A videogame adaptation of Hamlet has been turned back into a stage show

To be, or not to be—that is a rhetorical question, and it gets at the challenges facing anyone who wishes to convert Shakespeare’s Hamlet into a videogame. Games are about the ways user choices can shape a narrative and Hamlet—well, let’s just say he prefers to keep his own counsel.  Every level must be conquered until Hamlet’s father’s death has been avenged!  Nevertheless, Simon Peacock, the Voice and Motion Capture Director of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, recently took on the challenge of converting Hamlet into a videogame, and then converting that game back into a play. This is more than a theatrical game…
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MANOS: The Hands of Fate-The movie-based game we never knew we needed

Generally speaking, videogame adaptations of movies have got to be the lowest tier in the hierarchy of bad videogames. Whether we’re talking about Austin Powers Pinball, the infamous E.T. the Extraterrestrial on Atari or 2011’s Smurf Dance Party (which featured such musical gems as “Who Let the Smurfs Out,” “I like to Smurf it-Smurf it” and “Smurf this Way”), movie-based games are almost always cheap, poorly put-together money grabs, riding on the gold-lined coattails of their successful film counterparts. Thankfully, in the case of Manos: The Hands of Fate, we don’t have to worry about that. The 1966 movie, with a whopping score of 1.9/10 on IMBD and 0%…