The Gaming Grid

… wasn’t all that great, to be honest.

Anytime I see a movie or series dealing with Street Fighter, I usually cringe, especially if it’s made in America. I know a lot of backstories and how characters intertwine and who is what and everything else, but the people who should know it, the writers, just take character names and make up a story. A prime example is the first live-action Street Fighter movie with JCVD in it. Guile, who is solely American, is played by a Belgian actor. I have to give it to him on two aspects: 1) the Flash Kick he manages to pull off twice and 2) he’s the only one who pronounces Ryu’s name correctly. When I saw it at the theater, I knew stuff was all messed up. E. Honda is now from Hawaii and not Japan like he’s supposed to be. Balrog is a good guy. Dee Jay is working for Bison. Chun-Li is a news reporter. Cammy is helping Guile instead of being with Delta Red. T. Hawk is a moron. Blanka is made up from Guile’s friend Charlie. Charlie is called Carlos Blanka. Dhalsim is the guy from the Temple of Doom and never fights anyone and never uses the Yoga noogie. Fei Long doesn’t exist. Ken and Ryu are thieves or something. Vega wasn’t bad, but needed blonde hair. Raul Julia did a good job acting as Bison, but his voice was too high for the part. Zangief was well conceived, but again, he works for Bison for some reason.

So there’s the nitpicking on the first SF movie ever done. I had major issues with it and even with this new Chun-Li movie, I still have them. Watch out for spoilers if you don’t want to know anything and plan on wasting $10 to go see it. I know I did…

The story is this: Chun-Li’s father is some very important businessman and not a Hong Kong police officer as he really is from her actual back story. He apparently is very influential and Bison kidnaps him to identify other CEO’s families so he can get them to do what he wants. Chun-Li’s mother, who actually died when Chun-Li was born/very little, has some disease and dies when Chun-Li is a teenager or whatever age she’s supposed to be in the movie. (That never comes up.) After her mom dies, she receives some scroll at a piano recital (another thing that’s odd…) and goes ot the city to see what it means. Some lady tells her to go find Gen and off she goes to Bangkok for some reason.

Basically, the movie is about Chun-Li running around slums and stuff looking for Gen. Gen is played by Robin Shou (Liu Kang from Mortal Kombat). Why? I’m not really sure. Yes I know he’s Chinese and is a martial arts expert, but Gen is supposed to be an old man with white hair and a long beard. In this movie, Gen is buff and doesn’t really have an issue moving around since he’s not old. Once she finds him, he helps her train while Bison kills a bunch of guys to get his way.

The fights in the movie don’t last long at all. Vega and Chun-Li’s fight lasts about 2 minutes, if that. He dies from being hung by his feet. At least, that’s what it looks like. Balrog fights Gen and gets killed by a steam pipe being injected into him. And the final battle… Bison fights Gen and then fights Chun-Li. She supposedly kills him and everything is fine again.

Charlie is in the movie, but doesn’t look at all like his character and is played by Chris Kline. He could actually be eliminated from the movie completely and it wouldn’t affect anything. At the end, Liu Kang, I mean, Gen, tells Chun-Li there’s a tournament posting (in the newspaper) and he’s going to look for Ryu (but says it like RYE-YOO and not REE-YOO). She doesn’t want to go along as she’s back home at her house with no parents… Although she’s not through with fighting.

I didn’t gain anything from the movie except that no one seems to grab the concept of the Street Fighter characters (or ANY video game, characters or not) at all. I think all they see is that these characters fight each other and some die. If there’s ever a video game movie that gets the characters AND their stories straight, I’d be amazed. Mortal Kombat ALMOST did that except they combined MK1 and MK2 characters together in the first movie.

You have been warned about the content of the Street Fighter: Legend of Chun-Li movie, so go see it at your own risk to your wallet. Man, I wish I was a director…

Well, with my latest episode over my latest 360, I got Kung Fu Panda for free. Now it has been a long time since I have played a full blo0d platformer. I was really excited about the games. Now I know that this is for kids since the movie was for kids, so I did not figure a very difficult game. What I got was a free fun game.

Now I really don’t feel like I need to talk much about the game, its your standard platfomers. There isn’t much missing, but also not added. It is a platformer there is not much to make this game work. So while I did like this game, I wondered if any of the people making the game had actually watched this game. Now I love watching movies, and since my 3 year old daughter has made me watch Kung Fu Panda 3 times a week. I know that game back to front.

So when the game comes out and there are these extra stuff that completely changes the whole meaning of the game, you wonder where they got this stuff from. It still wasn’t bad, but if the development team was working on this about the same time, if not a little bit before the movie, could then directly pull info from the movie production company?

This is a just the weird side of movies being translated to games for reasons. Usually when they go far off the actual story usually they already announced their death knell. The second is that the only character that is the same in the game as in the movie, is the master that trains Poe. All of the other characters do not have the same mentality as in the movies. But my thinking is that they did a decent job, is that they picked a simple enough game type.

Now, I know that most of the development companies that work are rushed because of the time line. They have to work on a shorter time line, and sometime cant get a good product out. I think this is now more prevalent in this console generation than ever. I would atleast say put this on your gamefly, but not worth it unless its under 10$.

This weekend the Wife and I had the weekend to our own, so we wanted to go and watch a movie after a nice dinner. We both wanted to go see the new James Bond movie, but it was not in the cards. We looked at other times of movies that were playing around the same time. Max Payne was going to start the same time as Quantum of Solace.

Now playing the first game, and I love good cop noirs, I figured this should be at least entertaining. First let me tell you a little about the game if you have not played it. This I believe was the first game to have the slow time mechanic in a game. It was also at the time, the game to judge how top end your computer was.

While this was a video game adaptation of a Film Noir, and a cop drama, You kind of have to go into it know that some of the plot is going to be very easy to figure out, and the voice acting is going to be over the top. Oh and don’t forget the angst, there is lots of that.

Now one of the predictable plot points is that Max is a good cop, and of course something happens to his wife and kid. Now if anyone has seen any cop movie where this happens we all know this only pisses the cop off and he kills everyone. When will they ever learn, this does not work?

Now that you know the main thing behind the game, let me tell you that I though the movie made very good parallels to the game. But that’s about all it was good at. First of all the Director really needs to go back to school and figure out how to make a noir film. The whole look and feel of the movie was to bright and clean. There were a lot of scenes where it took place in side streets or crappy clubs, but it still did not look right. As if they were trying to hard and missed the target all together.

Without setting the tone of the movie correctly all the dialogue felt forced and over the top. I felt like, I was watching an acting class, and not so much a completed movie. I did not believe the anger towards his former partner or other people. Also in the movie they don’t play up regret and anger much, so you don’t really feel like he needs to be hell bent on killing the whole world. Unlike the Punisher movie, not warzone I have not seen that yet.

The last big complaint that I have about the game is that, I figured out the plot of the whole movie in the first ten minutes of watching. Now you might say that, Oh you played the video game so you know, but the fact is they made the clues so obvious it was Paynfull. OH! Snap. Sorry I won’t do that again. The problem with that is they made if obvious that he did not know what was going on, so when they show you almost at the end of the movie you wonder what it takes to be a detective, because I could do this.

The best part of the movie is at the end, and you will know what I’m talking about when you see it. That whole last scene is how the movie should have been shot. All said, I think the movie could have been done right, but this was not it by far.