OC article: When did bad movies equate to gaming?

When critics blast a film by saying it feels like a video game, you know something is not right.

• “Once the newness of ‘300’s’ look wears off, which it inevitably does, what we are left with is a videogame come to life” – Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
• “The excitement amounts to little more than a video game on the big screen,” – Claudia Puig, USA today
• ” ‘300’ will … be talked about as a technical achievement, the next blip on the increasingly blurry line between movies and video games,” – Dana Stevens, Slate

While scathing reviews are normal for any movie, what does concern us is the negative connotation in lines like these – why call it bad by comparing it to video gaming?

On one hand, this makes sense if the critics were making a further analogy to games like Dead Rising or Samurai Warriors – games like these are built for quick, gratuitous, testosterone-laden fun, though Samurai Warriors at least offered a basic history lesson on the offhand.

On the other – and what gets our beef the most – is that critiques like these disregard games that have proven more than once to be major achievements outside junk-food appeal. We’re talking about games like Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Resistance: Fall of Man, Okami, Shadow of the Colossus, or even Gears of War. How many of us can agree that these games went so much further than just mindless violence, that they told a compelling story that pushed us to keep playing?

If anything, it does make us wonder if film critics generally know that much about gaming in the first place, which is fast becoming an industry just as sophisticated as (if not more than) the film industry. On a related note, Eidos’ 300: March to Glory game didn’t do so well, with a 5.6 rating from IGN, and an overall 7.9 from the players.

When critics blast a film by saying it feels like a video game, you know something is not right.

• “Once the newness of ‘300’s’ look wears off, which it inevitably does, what we are left with is a videogame come to life” – Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
• “The excitement amounts to little more than a video game on the big screen,” – Claudia Puig, USA today
• ” ‘300’ will … be talked about as a technical achievement, the next blip on the increasingly blurry line between movies and video games,” – Dana Stevens, Slate

While scathing reviews are normal for any movie, what does concern us is the negative connotation in lines like these – why call it bad by comparing it to video gaming?

On one hand, this makes sense if the critics were making a further analogy to games like Dead Rising or Samurai Warriors – games like these are built for quick, gratuitous, testosterone-laden fun, though Samurai Warriors at least offered a basic history lesson on the offhand.

On the other – and what gets our beef the most – is that critiques like these disregard games that have proven more than once to be major achievements outside junk-food appeal. We’re talking about games like Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Resistance: Fall of Man, Okami, Shadow of the Colossus, or even Gears of War. How many of us can agree that these games went so much further than just mindless violence, that they told a compelling story that pushed us to keep playing?

If anything, it does make us wonder if film critics generally know that much about gaming in the first place, which is fast becoming an industry just as sophisticated as (if not more than) the film industry. On a related note, Eidos’ 300: March to Glory game didn’t do so well, with a 5.6 rating from IGN, and an overall 7.9 from the players.