They Fight

November 4th, 2009Blog3 comments

Fighting Video Games Make Fundamentally Flawed Movie Adaptations: Now joining the recent Dead or Alive and Street Fighter movies are new adaptations of King of Fighters and Tekken. Whether these two new films break the trend of bad video game adaptations remains to be seen; however, the track record for fighting games-as-movies has not been good.

I think that fighting games are terrible properties to be turned into movies. It’s simple: The medium of film calls for a tightly focused story that tracks one or two characters. But fighting games offer a smorgasbord of characters that the player can choose to control — usually 12 or more. In a film adaptation, the question comes down to who you track. Do you try to track all of them? A group? One? Which one? And how do you put them into a situation that requires fighting without making such a story ludicrous?

Plus the backstories of fighting game characters are, by their nature, two dimensional because they have to be. When you play a fighting game, you have to choose between playing as “the tae kwon do guy” or the “giant slow, high-damage wrestling guy” or the “quick sexy lady”. Every character detail needs to be purely physical and visual so that players know what style of play they’re going to get — a quick dude that does a little damage or a slow dude that does massive damage. As a result, any extra information is absolutely unnecessary — there is no reason to create a complex backstory. Plus you couldn’t get a deep backstory to read anyway because all the players want is FIGHTING. Cinematic cut-scenes? Skip ‘em. The players just want to fight.

Thus the developers’ primary concern in making a fighting game isn’t story — their goal is to push polygons and create compelling, non-button-mashing gameplay. It’s not their job to think about story, because any story only gets in the way of the actual fighting.

So now think of the poor screenwriters who have to adapt these things into movies. Who do you track? How do you invent a backstory for these silly, surfacey characters? How do you adapt the material that already exists (“BISON IS THE LEADER OF A GLOBAL CRIME SYNDICATE HURF BLURF DURR”) and make it interesting and engaging? It’s literally like being given a bag of twelve action figures and being asked to construct a story that involves all of them — with the added pressure of knowing that the upstairs guys are going to spend $30 mil on this thing and really, really, really don’t want to lose that money.

It’s not a game you can win. It seems like the only way out is to just not play.

Westside Tavern — my current It Place for meet ups and edibles. The burger is quite good, but the pot roast is the thing. It’s a bone-in slab of meat nestled on a pillow of mashed potatoes — the sort of thing that you usually find tipping over Fred Flintstones’ car. The flatbread with shiitake mushrooms, bacon, and asparagus is also pretty great too. Nice atmosphere, plus if it gets too crowded you can levitate upstairs to the usually empty wine bar in the movie theater.