The Carnivore Prince's Game Blog

Video game movies have always been pretty interesting to me from the perspective of someone that really likes both mediums, more notably the way games are portrayed in an art form that's far more established and with a longer line of prestige and cultural importance. I've always subconsciously thought of it as a kind of older and younger brother dynamic but regardless, the ones that fall more into the younger camp have mostly known about this for years and it definitely results in a lot of complicated feelings about how worthwhile the medium actually is.

But despite Roger Ebert famously being an old coot about the whole thing alongside several others, movies have kinda not been able to help revolve every occasional decently budgeted story about the New Thing that's evidently causing a lot of commotion and as will become definitely more obvious down the road, very profitable for better or worse.

I've had this project in the back of my mind for 4 months and I figured now was as good a time as any to get it actually in full gear so without further ado;

Sorted by release date, these are all the video game movies Wikipedia cites as "centered on video games", a couple of more were added since I compiled this but I figured letting Free Guy be the "final boss" of this project would be fitting. It'll almost certainly be the toughest on me mentally but we'll get there.

I'll go through all of these alongside my typical game coverage, but these aren't going to just be film reviews, my goal is to primarily examine how filmmakers interpret and use video games in their own work, which is why I'm not doing movies based on video games (way too many to count and most are just their own kind of film as opposed to anything about video games). I've only seen 7/46 of these so far, you'll figure out which when we get to them.

With all that out of the way, let's kick things off with...

Tron (1982)

I was honestly pretty surprised to find out this was what's apparently the catalyst of video game movies but by all accounts, it's far better than what I had expected. Double surprising too seeing how mixed everyone else seems on it despite being so famous.

The premise is actually relatively typical for an 80s adventure movie but it's layered underneath a lot of jargon that doesn't seem to even make much internal sense. It's all stuff that'll generally sound like it makes enough sense on its own until you think about it for even a minute but it's bold as hell to put this much trust in the audience to know that it all ultimately doesn't matter and it's just in service to the story and aesthetic.

And the aesthetic is like, wew. It is a genuine marvel to look at and absolutely not even cuz of the CG. All the actors seem to have been greenscreened and then have their frames waterpainted over and it makes for a super interesting effect. It's obviously not flawless and there are clear artifacts from this process but it does also result in everyone having this slight sort of shakiness which made the whole world feel a lot more unstable which is cool cuz everyone is literally just a program.

The visuals in general feel so much more ahead of the curve than they have any right to, everything's illuminated and highlighted with LEDs. Even obvious tricks like reflective water have so much bloom that you forget it's literally just water, straight up I don't know why Razer doesn't adapt to this kind of aesthetic wholesale instead of the sometimes ugly bloomy lights they tend to go for.

All that alongside the slightly bit-crushed and reverbed audio design makes for a data-driven universe that's as dreamy as it is alien, which considering the kind of cultures and interests the internet cultivated, which this also kinda predicted in its own way. The downtimes really showcase The Grid's cold vastness, even the action scenes don't get that bombastic all things considered.

The video game stuff itself is a lot closer to something tangibly real than I expected too, the motorcycle races are contextualized as competitive multiplayer Snake and the other games are also, kinda silly but it's not impossible to picture them as their own VR esports, in this case being algorithmically perfected by various AI vessels, as you do.

Anyway, this project's off to a shockingly stellar start. Things will definitely vary in terms of quality from here on out but this far exceeded expectations. A good kick-off to what is definitely gonna get worse down the road, but hey, we're pretty far from that still. We can bask in the goodness of genuinely enthusiastic video game movies before formulas had become perfected and took genuine risks. Still, Tron happened a year before the game crash so things are probably gonna look fairly different from this point on, but that's alright. We're still in the experimental era, anything's possible.

When Half-Life Alyx was announced, I kind of lost my shit because it really did feel like some sort of resurgence might've actually been happening. I was one of those dorks that flipped out when the Left 4 Dead 3 leaks happened which just turned out to be test maps for Source 2, I was still just so high off the energy Portal and Steam in general had given off that it just made sense if they were working on a new thing. But this was a proper confirmation, they were doing something beyond a tech demo for something I didn't have access to. They, were doing an entire game for something I didn't have access to.

It's chill though, everything I've heard and seen has proven it's as one-of-a-kind as most of their other stuff. I'll inevitably try it out in a couple decades when getting a battered up HTC Vive won't put a dent in my wallet for what amounts to "the thing I'd need for HL Alyx" and almost nothing else.

Let's get this out of the way, Grady >>>>>>> Whetley

Aperture Desk Job stands out in this regard though as it's actually playable with just a controller. It was also the first time I've really used my Switch pro controller's gyro on PC so that was neat. I'm glad it exists and everything about it is still as solid as what you'd expect but aside from demonstrating every single input with Valve's Switch, there's really not much here for anyone that hasn't just been thirsting for anything from Valve. You get some ideas that were tapped into during Portal 2 being realized proper and a couple callbacks and that's more or less it, it's cute but like, yeah. From my perspective, it was almost more of a Source 2 test than anything which isn't bad in its own way, it's slick and runs really well for what little it got to demonstrate but it only makes me wish more games were using it. This is the one time I'll get to use it for anything without resorting to Dota and like man I'm not that desperate.

Little Ghost ascribes itself as a metroidvania about platforming as opposed to combat, which is certainly the quickest way of describing it in Gamer terms, but there's quite a bit more going on here.

It's hard to find a definitive catch-all slogan to describe it because it feels like so much. It's like a Knytt Stories-esque exploration through a massive spread-out collage scrapbook with knickknacks and artifacts from seemingly every and any art period. It took me until I looked further into it to realize the more modern stuff were cameos from other indies because they fit in that well. It reminded me a lot of how it felt playing LittleBigPlanet 2 as a kid with little to no context to the references and callbacks it kept making to art movements and aesthetics, accompanied with a licensed soundtrack that spanned so many genres and time periods. All you can really do from that perspective is take in what it evokes in you, in the case of LBP 2, those feelings further solidified my faith in video games as an instrument of communication, of expressing and remixing ideas that have been around for potentially centuries and recontextualize it to make it accessible and open to nerdy PlayStation kids. I'll definitely have to write a proper thing on LBP someday but that's the gist.

It was actually around the time I had started thinking back on it that I unlocked a podcast with Negativland's Mark Hosler on copyright law and his time doing stuff with the band. I kinda had to step back a bit to process it because it was just so surreal.

One of the biggest, most influential groups of my adolescence (who are literally all about recontextualizing media and art to make their own statements and works) were in a game that was both doing the exact same thing alongside its own unique art and asset, but was also overwhelmingly reminding me of when the exact same thing had been done a decade ago with the same floaty platforming.

This might sound dramatic but it really did feel like most of my inspirations were coming together in this game that I just randomly stumbled across, and not in an intellectual property crossover way, like an ideological one. It's obviously not the most unlikely meshing of inspirations and ideas, but it's hard not to feel a serious understanding with what it's going for by fusing all this together into its own piece of work with this synergized of a balance between original and Stolen™ assets.

While I do really want to keep just finding more ways to gush about this game's open-ended nature, the way ideas and stories form naturally in your head while wandering around finding more art to look into, there are a couple of fairly major issues. The controls are real slippery, and not in a way that feels intended by design. Maybe it's just a controller sensitivity issue but Ghost would keep turning to the left the moment I let go of a direction and it looks a little jank, particularly while moving right. It also threw me off a bit how hard and tight-knit the level design is, I've been playing platformers most of my life but even this had some tough bits. It doesn't jive well with the vibes that I presumed were a lot more relaxed than this, on top of deaths (and in-game sound effects in general) being pretty loud and cutting through whatever you put on in the background. It's not great, it feels like a particularly harsh punishment for messing up which I guess I can understand if that's the intent but it's not very nice either way.

Overall though, I can't pretend it hasn't been on my mind since. (been 3 days since I played as of this writing) I only did half of everything there is in the demo but what I got resonates a lot with me still. It felt like getting into a big Wikipedia rabbit hole or aimlessly wandering around a library. For how much there is to take in and how much you know you'll never have the time to get around to, it is very affirming to know a lot of our past as weird art-creating creatures still serves the foundation of so many things in and outside of its own niches. It's easy to forget the value of everything we create when it's so often having to be made under awful constraints. (or worse, algorithms) You forget it's out there and people will see it and it might earnestly change them, for better or worse, in mild or life-changing ways. Ways sometimes strong enough that it becomes material itself, to be used and replicated in more literal ways than copyright wants to allow.

Our ancestors are probably a little weirded out by the extent we actively steal and rip each other off (a lot of artists now are still weird about it despite at least half of our current output being directly transformative works) but it'd be nice to see the day where it's all a legal, global standard, even if that'll make it less cool to do. We're in a weird spot right now law wise that's on the verge of changing drastically again but I want to be optimistic. There's certainly no way we're gonna have a mass exodus on Amen break samples or vaporwave albums with stolen Sailor Moon screencaps for covers.

We've already developed too many subcultures and aesthetics that revolve around this fundamental aspect of creation to have it just disappear, it's as embedded in us as art from any past generation and will only continue to be more so in time. The only real question left is to figure out what you want to do with it.

Steam

I managed to actually complete Basic a couple days ago, I'm not sure if I've gotten that kind of high from anything besides the Souls games (less than 2 weeks until Elden Ring hnngh) especially from a tile-matcher, literally only Tetsuya Mizuguchi could do something like this.

Can we talk about how rad a song title 'Please Return My CD' is? Like man

A little before this, I went through all the 2P CPU battles which helped out a lot speed wise, I think. Most of the rounds seem to come down to sub-minute duels of who can make the most clears the fastest, makes me wonder if there's any kind of competitive scene for multiplayer duels. The highlight's definitely how much the exclusive CPU battle skins stand out from the single-player ones, those are still great and everything but these strike as so much more experimental art-style and theme wise, they got real weird with it and god bless 'em for it. Aside from that, uhh yea, this has been kind of a trip. I'll definitely get to more of Tetsuya's stuff at some point (still gotta get into Rez proper) but this has been tight. Not nearly as emotionally charging as Tetris Effect or anything but the mechanics take full center here and like I said last time, it's still got a ton of that synesthesia-driven energy, most of my time went to mentally processing it from a very core mechanical level but the emotional resonance was still absolutely there, it's just a lot more subconscious compared to Tetris Effect. It was really fulfilling from the perspective of viewing it as a challenge instead of an experience to feel™, more or less.

It's funny, I did actually get quite a Tetris effect from this, maybe even more than the actual Tetris Effect. There'd be several nights before I fell asleep and before getting up where I would just actually visualize the game unfolding in my head and solutions that seemed to make too much sense to not work in practice. Usually I'd be proven wrong as soon as I got back in because my brain wasn't accounting for everything but the fact it got as far as it did at all is incredible, it's no wonder Tetris and tile-matchers in general became Tetsuya's main thing, it's far too international to not collide so perfectly with his ideals and clear wants to achieve with the artform.

I'm gonna have to leave it alone for a bit so I don't start accidentally sinking even more time into it when I got other stuff I gotta write about but here's when I cleared Basic, to put it to rest, or something. Good video game

A lot prouder of this than I maybe should be, ahaha, it's good though, I think..

Okay let's just get this out of the way now, this game's a bit of a mess.

The initial setup revolves around a tea party set up by the lead developer of the VN itself alongside the self-inserts of the rest of the dev team (or so I'm assuming? the credits are all in Russian so idk) that eventually devolves into all of them inserting themselves into the VN, or at least some of them. A couple of them just do not appear again after it gets to the VN in the VN, speaking of which, let's get to that!

This internal VN centers around a presumably schizophrenic middle-aged Siberian revolutionary(???) that managed to kidnap the president of the Russian federation(????) and now holds him ransom somewhere™ while hosting an anime arc ass tournament with what are mostly figments of his imagination revolving around what I honest to god assumed was just a big euphemism for masturbation. But there's quite a bit to suggest it might not be? But it still gets uncomfortably close to feeling like it??

That's all well and good, but do they have pronouns?

It's hard to tell how much of this was even meant to be examined this way, any kind of way, really. It's just so insular and contained in its own in-jokes and references to what I'm presuming is the Russian indie scene? It makes for a really murky, uncomfortable vibe regardless cuz outside of basically everyone shitting on Nikolai, there's not much else going on aside from his imaginary friends dying in gross ways with no clear rhyme or reason.

Now that we're all set on the plot, now's a good time to mention this VN's completely linear, no choices needed, baby, not that I can imagine what kind of choices you could want to make besides quitting while you're ahead.

The UI and presentation is probably the most interesting part of the whole thing, everyone's only got a single portrait that shakes and zooms depending on the gravity of the situation like cardboard cut-outs, it's actually kinda neat.

The text is also accompanied by keyboard clicks The Silver Case style, but instead of being clinical and cold (and a typewriter), all dialogue from the previous chunk gets spilled all over the screen and lingers for a bit. It almost feels thematically intentional given how much of a mess this is to read through, I haven't even mentioned the English translation, it's practically Hong Kong 97-tier.

Good ending. This feels like it came from some alternate reality where ZUN was Russian and got really into Fight Club. And frequenting 4chan. I bring him up specifically because the dev has multiple games that seem to revolve or spin off of each other extended-universe style, 2 characters even appear in this one specifically just to bail and go off to do their own thing. They span different genres too, all presumably running off the Godot engine considering how obsessed this game is with it.

Regardless, this was certainly another odd one. I'll really need to get to something at least a little more traditional next time, yeesh.

So Press X to Not Die prides itself on being this ode to 90s FMV games but in a weird twist of fate or, whatever, it feels a lot closer to being representative of the micro-niche Xbox Live Indie Game FMV games or just most of XBLIG in general. Only, it managed to slip through the cracks and get a PC port so as to not let it fade into obscurity with all the other stuff that was being dumped on there.

This might need a bit more context actually. XBLIG was a service for the Xbox 360 that saw a lot of very, particular kinds of jank games.

remember what they took from you... I almost want to compare it to a weird fusion between Newgrounds Flash games and the bootleg asset flips that seemed really prevalent on mobile services during the 2010s, it's such a particular vibe that really hasn't been replicated anywhere since, even just for the sake of a gag.

note: none of these are the X button.

So Press X to Not Die really stands out to me from the perspective of someone that grew up watching YouTubers playing these things that seemed to be created in complete isolation by amateurs. It's almost surreal to be actively playing something that actually started from there (that isn't by Silver Dollar anyway) The button prompts are the same kinda gross looking X360 buttons, most of the dialogue is so ludicrously outdated, I had sincerely thought the game was originally made in 2013. These guys were really out here making Hunger Games and Twilight jokes in 2015, it really feels like it was written by a redditor that got frozen in time. Even the protag is just this really average dudebro, there's dialogue choices on occasion but there's nothing to really dictate his behavior outside of the occasional chance to get 'lolrandom' with it.

The changes between shots are super rigid and it gets particularly bad during 1-on-1 fights that take more than a couple prompts to proceed. Not that I can really blame the devs because the first-person nature of the filming and how it's being used was going to make it very shaky regardless.

Pictured: this game's attempt at a Punch-Out!! fight. Now imagine this but violently shaking I dunno if it's enough to lead to motion sickness or anything but it does make scenes where anyone's up close to the camera incredibly awkward (as I hope you can tell). Aside from one choice that is Very weird, the game's not offensive or anything, it just tries really, really hard, harder than even most XBLIG games I remember. Half the time I couldn't help being kind of enamored by it because it's just so desperate, the Awesome Sauce is just leaking from it like a gross, oily sludge.

The plot's at least kind of interesting. Most of the population becomes incessantly violent (so vaguely zombie-like but not really) as a result of a government science experiment gone wrong and it's only the Gamers of the world that aren't affected (yes really) It ties directly into the core gameplay loop which is literally just pressing whatever combination of buttons it demands at the given moment. It's easy to assume it was just an excuse to justify the game's existence but it does get pretty close to almost being commentary on the perception of games as a whole. It's the absolute minimum of what can be considered a game to a lot of people, there's fail states, quite a few, actually. They're even neatly categorized in the extras menu after you beat the game to ensure you this is not just a movie that you gotta press buttons to resume!

I've been playing video games for longer than I've done anything else, it's colored my perception of the world more than anything else, (barring a few phases where it felt conflicting to associate so strongly with them) so at this point the connection is basically untetherable.

I was raised primarily on PC and Nintendo stuff early on but I like to think I've got more or less an open-ended, global perspective now, or at least as open as it can get. Learning about people, cultures and things through video games has been one of the bigger reasons I manage to justify still being into it to people that are completely detached from it.

Video games can be and have been a lot of things, on a technical level they have more versatility than any other medium but are also the most fragile. We have entire categories of games that fundamentally cannot last for longer than a couple decades in the form they're meant to be experienced. The industry itself is in a constant battle with itself on how it should be perceived, we've only recently narrowed the mainstream perspective down to another, slightly more colorful version of "boy toys", but it's whatever, they don't matter. Not from this abstract hivemind collective sort of viewpoint anyway.

Beat Takeshi knows better than anyone else to not worry about what outsiders will think.

What matters is that video games are very good, from the many other perspectives that have actually looked into them. Them as a subject in and of themselves will undoubtedly come up again in future posts but I'll definitely make sure it's not as overtly broad as this. I guess it's hard to help since I'm trying to write about something so subconsciously integral to my existence, it's like trying to write about why breathing is good, it's hard to know where to start besides the very core stuff.

I guess now's a good time as any to get into how all of this got conceived in the first place. I started a RYM diary list thing where I went into detail on everything I'd been playing throughout the start of 2022, it's kinda been the first time I've really done any writing on games at all. Then I got a suggestion from one of my friends to move it to a Tumblr blog and here we are, more or less!

So let's not waste any more time, it is very precious. To quote one of my biggest inspirations for the past couple years Tim Rogers;

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that video games were created awesome. That I was born stupid. However. I will not die hungry. Video games forever.