Ripon College Days

With the newest blockbuster "Sin City" tearing up the box office, one has to wonder how cool it would be to play as Hardigan tracking down Nancy on their home gaming console; but at what price?

While "Sin City: The Game" is under development, no screens or details have been released and not even the games development company has been named yet. While it is unknown whether the game will be worthy of gamers' time, it is no surprise that the gaming industry will try to cash in on another franchise game.

Throughout gaming history franchise games have been around sucking players' quarters in the arcades and emptying wallets to be played at home. These games have been around even as early as Atari 2600 systems with "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," even early arcades had the first "Star Wars" game.

Since these early titles, franchise games have been hit or miss. "Star Wars" is the best example of the good and bad found in franchise titles. "Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2" is a great first-person shooter that successfully uses force powers and weapons directly from the "Star Wars" universe while still implementing fun game-play mechanics and an interesting story.

On the other side of the spectrum, "Star Wars: Episode One The Phantom Menace" for the Playstation failed in just about every area that "Jedi Knight" succeeded in. The controls were abysmal making it near-impossible to complete any jumping task, the story suffered from the same writing as the movie and there was nothing unique about playing through the game.

What boggles the mind is that each game was published and developed by LucasArts. How is it that one game can be a game of the year candidate and the other should never have even been conceived?

The answer is simple. Development and Publishing companies are always looking for the easy sell in order to make profit. While I'm generalizing a lot here, many companies have lately been trying to sell games based only on the franchise the game revolves around.

The most evident of this is Shiny Entertainment's attempt to create a game based on the "Matrix" universe. "Enter the Matrix" is a sorry excuse for an action game that could have possessed an incredible amount of creativity. Sure, some of the bullet-time moves are neat, but after about fifteen minutes of gameplay, every move can be executed and the thrill then leaves. While the fun factor definitely isn't there, the play mechanics were also sloppy, making it an unmemorable experience overall.

It seems that Shiny, along with Warner Brothers and Atari, the publishers of "Enter the Matrix" were just trying to make a game that would sell to fans of "The Matrix" and its sequels rather than to those who enjoy a game with innovation. Bullet-time had already been used in games like "Max Payne" much more effectively and Shiny was using the fact that their game had bullet-time as a selling point.

When working with a franchise, it really seems to be much more difficult to create a game that will meet the expectations of those who know the characters and story of that franchise so the game doesn't flop.

Games like "Goldeneye" developed by Rare for the Nintendo64 and "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" Electronic Arts for the current generation consoles use fun, addicting game engines that adapt to the franchise they are using. This method is much more effective than taking a franchise and then trying to build a game around it. If the game is fun even after the licensed characters and storylines are removed, then the game is worthy of play.

A great example of a game that uses licensed characters on a supplemental basis alone is "Kingdom Hearts" developed by Squaresoft (now Square-Enix) for the Playstation2. The game brilliantly blends Disney characters with the insanely popular characters from the Final Fantasy universe created by Square. The result is a wonderfully addictive adventure RPG that revolves around Sora and his quest to find the light inside his heart. While it sounds cheesy, it is a beautifully crafted game and has my vote for game of the year in 2002.

While franchise games have been hit or miss lately, it's incredibly difficult to know whether the next onslaught of these easy selling games will be enjoyable to play. "Sin City", the upcoming "Godfather" game and the recently announced "From Russia with Love" are all upcoming games using very well known movie franchises.

The games could be great action masterpieces or they could just be a sloppy experience with cool voice overs from well known actors (Robert Duvall, James Caan and the late Marlon Brando in "Godfather" and Sean Connery in "From Russia with Love.")

While time will only tell on these three games, gamers can only hope that development companies can create more fun games than simple, sloppy franchise games.

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