Jeff Gerstmann Senior Editor

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The Cinematic Thing...Again

OK, so, a funny thing happened on the way to finishing Everything or Nothing. I actually started caring quite a lot about how the story was going to end. That normally doesn't happen to me. I'm a pretty gameplay-oriented guy, and game stories are usually so poorly told that, if I weren't playing games with the thought of having to evaluate them in the back of my head, I'd probably skip most of that stuff.

That Bond game, though, was different. That's not to say that the story itself was particularly great. I mean, hey, ex-KGB guy wants to use nanobots to take over the world... It's not exactly the most innovative plot in the biz, but the other facets of the storytelling added up to enough to make me genuinely care about the cutscenes. That's a nice twist.

Yep. That's Jet Li all right. Too bad the gameplay didn't stand up to the rest of the production.

Sony's recent release, Rise to Honor, almost does the same thing, just not quite as well. The action and gameplay in Rise to Honor aren't really very exciting at all. On top of that, again, the plot isn't gangbusters. But the way it's told--the camera angles used in cutscenes, the option to hear it in Cantonese if you so desire, the pacing--turns it into something greater than the sum of its parts.

Graphics have a lot to do with it. Both games look pretty nice, and, perhaps not so coincidentally, they both star polygonal versions of recognizable actors. Seeing the computerman version of Jet Li beating guys up or watching a virtual Pierce Brosnan shoot bad guys in the face over and over again is surprisingly cool. The models look quite accurate, and the inclusion of voice and all that other stuff adds up to an experience that's, well, cinematic.

So it's too early to tell, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this is a trend in the making. This is the direction movie games should be moving in. Aping a movie plot and breaking it up into a generic-as-hell third-person action game simply isn't interesting anymore. But telling a movielike story or featuring characters from films in all-new scenarios is, at the very least, a cool idea. And, when you back it up with rad gameplay, à la Everything or Nothing, it makes for a pretty slick package. If you don't, well, then I guess you end up with Rise to Honor. Or, if you're really unlucky, you end up with Enter the Matrix.

The way I see it, game publishers are going to try to go Hollywood either way. I'm sure that we'll see plenty more games that get the cinematic thing right but totally bone the "game" part of their game. Releases like Everything or Nothing give me hope that at least some of them won't sacrifice the important things--like gameplay--in the process.

If I may switch gears for a minute, I have to say that I'm pretty excited that there's a new Mortal Kombat in the works. But am I going to have to start some sort of silly Internet petition to get Midway to include Stryker in the game, or what? Can I get some Stryker love out there? Where are all my Stryker fans? Hello? Is this thing on? Anyone? Stryker? He...had a gun? Anyone? Does that ring any bells? Sigh... I'm convinced that I'm the only one who picked Stryker on a regular basis. Oh well.