I know i haven't really been blogging that much recently, but i would like to think that the start of a new term will mean that i can get back on track with this blogging business, at least for the next few days anyway as i have had topics which i wanted to blog about, but just didnt due to me tinkering with pieces of work im unsatisfied with and me not being much of a writer.
Anyway i wanted to start writing about some thoughts that have been recently goin through my mind that i wanted to share with you all. Some of the major influences when producing ideas or designs for me have been through films, i get to see alot of films free anyway which is a big bonus when working in a cinema. But its always good to see that games can also influence films as i noticed in a film i watched a few weeks ago. The film that i'm writing about here is district 9, now this film i believe was always going to be closely influenced by games as the director was originally suppose to start work on the halo movie before distrubution rights made the entire project collapse and the director then moved on to make this movie.
When district 9 starts it all seems like a film and a quite different one at that as i found the racist remarks against the aliens referring to them as 'prawns' was an interesting touch along with the general behaviour towards the alien inhabitants. Then halfway through the film the main protagonist manages to accidently aquire an alien arm. Now to me this is something ive never seen in a film unless you want to include the original fly film, but in that case the character was left with the disadvantage of having their new body part. in District 9 however the character with the alien arm had the advantage of using alien technology and to become an almost unstoppable force in the film. This is where i think designers had the most amount of fun designing the weapons. It was at this point that i started to realise that most of the weapons were as though they had been taken straight from games. For instance there was a mech suit that had a gravity gun, that would fling pigs with powerful force at enemys that seem to have been taken from half life and tesla guns like in wolfenstein, though the gun in the film didnt just shock but would result in the victims guts exploding across the walls!
When i had finished watching it was then that i realised that this film easily could have been a game instead of a movie and now since this thought passed through my mind ive been making these comparisons with other films. like a few days ago i watched irobot, then whilst watching it i remembered how Will Smith actually has a bionic arm. this then immediately started me thinking about games like bionic commando or prototype. Even thinkin off the top of my head i know there are scenes in G.I. Joe where characters get to wear suits that make you run as fast as a car and let u jump over a train, which sounds more like a game scenario to me.
I guess my point to all this is that the line between games and film are thinner than i once thought. i knew that games and film were becoming more alike, we all know that some games have started to use actors as characters in game. but i just didn't realise how much similar they are these days. This then gets me started thinking about how nothing really seems that original anymore. it just seems to me that things are just taken from other peoples ideas and they are changed a little bit then they claim that the idea is original. Like i can understand where people like Peter Jackson are coming from who say that films like district 9 are original, but at the same time i dont agree with this statement as like i mentioned this film has taken ideas from games like half life and claim that its an original piece of work.
