Up, Down, Up, Down, Up Yours
By Brian Prisco | Posted Under Trailers | Comments (21)
The great failing of most videogame adaptations is that they don’t adhere enough to the storylines that made the games themselves great. Look at most of the offerings: videogames have become all but cinematic in the last five years. Sure, the dialogue may be a little clunky and the acting wooden, but that’s pretty much what’s been happening with action movies anyway. Explosion, explosion, knifefight, cliche, explosion, kiss, explosion.
The danger of adapting fighting videogames is that there isn’t a single storyline to adhere to. Usually, you have ten to 28 fighters on that select screen. Each one of them has a bare fragment of story line. To adapt it basically means summarily including every single damn character in some way. They get stuck to a lame plot usually involving the end of the world or world domination or a great artifact that will end the universe or Kevin Costner’s vision of the end of the world.
Tekken is getting the old big screen treatment — directed by the auteur who brought us one of the direct to video sequels of Anaconda and the brilliant scribe of The Marine. QUALITY, THY NAME IS TEKKEN! At this point, there’s gotta be fucking 73 characters in Tekken, including wolves, bears, tigers, a demon, and probably some part cyborgs. Men fight women which usually bugs the bejeezus on the big screen. We have no problem watching a blonde girl take a boot to the hooter if it’s pixellated, but god forbid it should occur on the silver screen.
I actually have a little faith for Tekken, from the trailer below, provided I’m not watching the extent of all the fighting right here. This kind of looks like the went the Jean Claude Van Damme route ala Kickboxer and The Quest: seventeen different fighting styles and more of a focus on backflips and spin kicks. It looks focused on the fighting — and to hell with the story. It involves something about the Tekken Corporation taking over the world unless one skinny vaguely Asian kid can kick someone the hardest.
Actually there’s only one thing that gives me any sort of faith. And that’s that the lead kid is claiming that this is getting an R rating. And for them to decided fuck it, we’re making a videogame that’s not about ripping off limbs or spinal cord violent enough to get the R, then hell’s yeah. It’s gonna at least have a fighting shot. Ha!
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Comments
Posted by: shamed in the shadows at January 18, 2010 10:03 AM
At this point, there’s gotta be fucking 73 characters in Tekken, including wolves, bears, tigers, a demon, and probably some part cyborgs.
Don't forget that ass-kicking tree! Ass splinters, man, that's all I'm sayin'.