Ask Erik: Episode Twenty-Four

Here at Ask Erik, we've spent a lot of time reading books and comics, watching movies, and browsing through the Internet in the hopes of finding the answers to life's biggest mysteries. Do the classic "rules" of naming planetary bodies still apply when so many are found so quickly these days?  Is there a mathematical formula for creating great music?  Why, Seattle?  Why must your baseball team hurt me so?

Having instead amassed a vault of useless knowledge stored in his head, Erik instead tackles your questions and tries to find the answers you care about (or a reasonable facsimile).  Or, if you don't care, he'll at least try to make you laugh and forget you just wasted time you could spend doing anything else.

Erik's Top Eleven: Video Games That Should Be Movies

Some friends of mine recently posted a link to a list of ten video games that should get the film treatment, and I have to be honest here, because to be dishonest would be to wrong my readers and I would never do that.

It felt like a pretty lazy list.  To me, it screamed "Let's take some of the biggest video games of all time, some of the highest reviewed ones, and a few classics and toss them in a list.  Boom, where's my paycheck?"

I mean, seriously.  Halo?  I get that it's huge, but to have a game starring a guy whose face you never see?  Master Chief isn't a character, he's a blank slate for the player to put themselves into.  I mean, unless they want us to get to see Channing Tatum's head under the mask when the helmet comes off, because that's what gamers want, right?  Same with Dead Space, because that's what I want to sit through for two hours is someone running around a spaceship shooting up monsters that aren't actually scary.  I saw that, it was called Alien: Resurrection.

So instead, I'm looking for games that have a good story, a world that needs development, and characters who are interesting, and I'll try to avoid any games that had either a live action or animated adaptation.

Morality, Opportunity, and Picking Sides: Choices in Video Games

The surge of "choice systems" in video games has had a rather significant resurgence in recent years.  Mostly, it seems like a way for a game developer to offer players a chance to customize their own game experience, make the story more unique to them.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.  There have been a few games I've played where it felt a choice system was simply tacked on, others seem to have their entire game premise based around difficult choices.

Now, I'm not a video game scholar.  I haven't studied the history of video games, or interviewed developers, or anything like that, so all I can report on is my own impressions.  If I'm off, or wrong about something, I hope someone lets me know in the comments below.  I'm not looking to pick a fight, just express what I've experienced.

More after the cut.