Nine Persons, Nine Hours, Nine Doors

You know what kinds of video games just don't really do well?

Okay, besides those, wise guy.

Mystery games.  For a very brief time in the 90's, I remember when there was a small surge in interactive storytelling involving murder mysteries or large crimes.  You'd start to play, and the game would randomly assign who the perpetrator was to a character, and reorganize the clues and dialogue accordingly.  You'd have to investigate, but since most games trying this were on CDs and cheap attempts at video capture were all the rage, you wound up with games like Ripper where you had Christopher Walken screaming at you and Karen Allen acting nowhere near as awesome as she does in Indiana Jones movies.

Plus, once you pick up on what changed in the story, it's usually pretty easy to figure out who the bad guy is.

More modern games have tried to do larger stories with a mystery reaching through, but once you play those games once, there's little replay value in doing it all over again.  Examples of this are Heavy Rain and L.A. Noire.

So when I found a Nintendo DS game called Nine Persons, Nine Hours, Nine Doors (or 999 for short), I was intrigued.  A mystery with multiple endings based off the choices you make, and while I was hesitant about the game just randomly changing who the bad guy was based off of stuff I picked (looking at you, Ripper), I figured that it was an obscure Japanese game, there must be some hook to it.

Twenty minutes in, I was hooked.

Plants Vs. Zombies

Up until a couple of years ago, I had never heard of a "tower defense" game.  Once I did know, they held pretty much no interest for me.

"Set up things to stop invaders from reaching your base?  Can I create inventive traps, change the landscape, or otherwise try to apply my own style to the game?  No?  Meh."

Little did I know that things would change over time.  Tower defense games would become their own niche in the market, covering everything from medieval fantasy to science fiction to gangsters to, well, zombies.  But how do you make a zombie game interesting so it isn't just people with shotguns trying to not get overwhelmed?

...okay, go on...

Thor! Again! But not really!

One of my original blog posts was a look at the movie Thor, which I liked but felt was not as good as it could have been.  Recently, however, I managed to pick up a copy of the Thor video game for the Nintendo DS and decided to see how its story manages to interact with the movie's story, and find out where it ranks on the list of "mostly terrible video game/movie collaborations."

Seriously, a way for me to know that I shouldn't pick up a video game is to hear the words "based on the movie" anywhere in the synopsis.  The only ones that really got it right for a long time were some of the Disney-based video games (Aladdin and The Lion King come readily to mind), a single James Bond-based game (Goldeneye), and one of the most underrated games of all time for the PC (Blade Runner).

...man, Blade Runner.  I've gotta dig that game out and do a post on it, because not enough people know about how awesome it is.

Where was I?  Oh, right.  In recent years this trend of most games based on movies being terrible has changed, no longer simply being a cheap way to slap a character likeness on a standard "jump the platforms" game or first person shooter.  The world certainly doesn't need more of some of the worst games ever.  Now a game might still be a rip-off of another popular game, but they'll at least design the world and controls around what you have...for the most part.