Jul 12, 2010
Jul 5, 2010
The Weasel Ideal: A Tribute To Hollywood Fight Scenes
Many games take their set-piece cues from Hollywood cinema. Shenmue pioneered the use of quick-time events to allow the player to have a (highly limited and frustrating) interaction with action-centric cutscenes. Max Payne gave you control over slow-motion. John Woo's Stranglehold added numerous stunts like diving over tables, rolling down the street on carts, and other such things.
But there have been very few video games that are about the actual making of a Hollywood film. There's The Movies, which was more of a management sim; Stuntman: Ignition, which covered the career of a Hollywood stunt driver; and...uh...well, I'm out of ideas. There just aren't many of them.
Let me further pad out this introduction by stating that I'm quite a fan of Jackie Chan's movies, and basically, this Weasel Ideal covers a game that might very well be the best possible way to do him justice.
Take your average beat-em-up game - walk down the street, whack some poor guy in the head with a two-by-four, walk down the street some more. While many games have given you the tools to make these things a little more exciting (Yakuza, God of War), few have really been as interesting to watch as a good martial arts action flick. So the idea here is to make a game where the emphasis is not on not dying, but in filming a martial arts movie to the specifications of your stunt director. So your goal is to eliminate all the enemies in the "scene" in as stylish a way as possible.
You start by selecting a "movie" (there are a number of settings available, from Medieval War Drama to Ancient China to Modern New York), where you are put into action in a number of different "scenes" (single areas). In each scene, the goal is to eliminate enemies using your vast repertoire of martial arts skills (more points if you don't overuse specific moves too much) and environmental hazards (best points if you use most of these in a scene, or if you use one particular hazard a number of times for the "Running Gag Bonus"). You have no health bar; if you take too much damage, your stunt director might scrap the take but you'll be allowed to continue to figure out where all the hazards are.
At certain points in each movie, you'll have to fight a Major Character (boss). A movie audience isn't going to see health bars, so one of the requirements for a good take on a boss scene is allowing your character to take enough hits (while still putting up a decent enough fight to be believable) to convince the audience that this boss really means business. The boss fight may not end with the boss being defeated; it may turn into a chase sequence. If a boss is supposed to be defeated, your director may ask that you do so in a specific fashion - while you're allowed to use any other method to dispatch him, you'll get more points for doing it the director's way (or a special secret way that gets more points but is well hidden). After disposing of the boss, you'll have a small amount of time in which to use your Taunt button to deliver a famous one-liner.
Much like in Stuntman: Ignition, you won't get by on the movies alone, and you'll probably want to spend some time "developing" new techniques (practicing on fellow stuntmen in the gymnasium) and showing off your stuff in television interviews or "DVD Extras" which allow you to try a previous scene under very different parameters.
Of course, any game about making movies would have to have a replay director mode and capability to upload to Youtube.
But there have been very few video games that are about the actual making of a Hollywood film. There's The Movies, which was more of a management sim; Stuntman: Ignition, which covered the career of a Hollywood stunt driver; and...uh...well, I'm out of ideas. There just aren't many of them.
Let me further pad out this introduction by stating that I'm quite a fan of Jackie Chan's movies, and basically, this Weasel Ideal covers a game that might very well be the best possible way to do him justice.
Take your average beat-em-up game - walk down the street, whack some poor guy in the head with a two-by-four, walk down the street some more. While many games have given you the tools to make these things a little more exciting (Yakuza, God of War), few have really been as interesting to watch as a good martial arts action flick. So the idea here is to make a game where the emphasis is not on not dying, but in filming a martial arts movie to the specifications of your stunt director. So your goal is to eliminate all the enemies in the "scene" in as stylish a way as possible.
You start by selecting a "movie" (there are a number of settings available, from Medieval War Drama to Ancient China to Modern New York), where you are put into action in a number of different "scenes" (single areas). In each scene, the goal is to eliminate enemies using your vast repertoire of martial arts skills (more points if you don't overuse specific moves too much) and environmental hazards (best points if you use most of these in a scene, or if you use one particular hazard a number of times for the "Running Gag Bonus"). You have no health bar; if you take too much damage, your stunt director might scrap the take but you'll be allowed to continue to figure out where all the hazards are.
At certain points in each movie, you'll have to fight a Major Character (boss). A movie audience isn't going to see health bars, so one of the requirements for a good take on a boss scene is allowing your character to take enough hits (while still putting up a decent enough fight to be believable) to convince the audience that this boss really means business. The boss fight may not end with the boss being defeated; it may turn into a chase sequence. If a boss is supposed to be defeated, your director may ask that you do so in a specific fashion - while you're allowed to use any other method to dispatch him, you'll get more points for doing it the director's way (or a special secret way that gets more points but is well hidden). After disposing of the boss, you'll have a small amount of time in which to use your Taunt button to deliver a famous one-liner.
Much like in Stuntman: Ignition, you won't get by on the movies alone, and you'll probably want to spend some time "developing" new techniques (practicing on fellow stuntmen in the gymnasium) and showing off your stuff in television interviews or "DVD Extras" which allow you to try a previous scene under very different parameters.
Of course, any game about making movies would have to have a replay director mode and capability to upload to Youtube.
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