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I read that this morning and died a little inside. Chair has done such a good job with both Shadow Complex and Infinity Blade, and my hopes were high for the Ender's Game ...game.
I don't know what other studio could really do the game justice. I'd be fine with Double Fine taking over the reigns though. They did an excellent job with Psychonauts and Costume Quest. Brutal Legend wasn't the best game but the writing was top notch. Double Fine really has some good writing talent, and I think that would be the most essential part of an Enders Game game.
My ultimate wish though would be if Ender's Game were written and directed by Tetsuya Takahashi. Xenogears and the Xenosaga series have some of the best and deepest storylines of any game I have ever played. He also worked on Final Fantasy IV and Chrono Trigger. Sadly that wish is impossible.
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: Damn you Strider, scooping my joke.
There's plenty you still could've done with the idea of OSC's 'baby'. I can't be blamed for your lack of imagination. Posts: 8741 | Registered: Apr 2001
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What a strange reason for canceling the project. "We only do ORIGINAL franchises!" We'll churn out Gears of War 30495 and 4 but we won't do Ender's Game.
Posts: 1194 | Registered: Jun 2010
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Chair Entertainment isn't even really a good candidate for a full-blown game using the IP. It's not a studio you could expect to mobilize the resources for stuff beyond Arcade on a current console. I guess card just likes them or has connections to them or they're mormon or something, or he planned to do EG as an arcade release?
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I think the subtext there was that they are skeptical that Ender's Game will birth a movie franchise in the short to mid term, and they're not willing to release a game without a pending movie.
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: I think the subtext there was that they are skeptical that Ender's Game will birth a movie franchise in the short to mid term, and they're not willing to release a game without a pending movie.
Considering the fact that 99% of video games that have any association with a movie franchise are complete, unmitigated crap, that would be a horrible reason not to make the game.
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quote:Originally posted by Fitz: Considering the fact that 99% of video games that have any association with a movie franchise are complete, unmitigated crap, that would be a horrible reason not to make the game.
Not really. Without a movie tie-in, Epic wouldn't realistically see enough of a market of interest for the game.
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Why, exactly? A lot of original IPs sell extremely well if they're good games, marketed correctly. Shadow Complex did great critically and financially, and it wasn't associated with a movie, let alone a famous sci-fi novel.
As to your earlier point, in hearing that Chair was to be the developer, I had always assumed that Ender's game would be an arcade release. Hoped for it, in fact. The relatively cheap development budget of a xbla/psn game, combined with the cache of a sci-fi classic seemed like a promising investment to me. And with Shadow Complex being a pretty good game, I had high hopes.
If OTOH they had decided to go the more boring route of making an unreal engine FPS-type game, I imagine that would've been a bad decision from the get go, what with a studio like Chair who had only done arcade games at that point, as far as I know.
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Blayne Bradley
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posted
quote:Originally posted by Samprimary:
quote:Originally posted by Fitz: Considering the fact that 99% of video games that have any association with a movie franchise are complete, unmitigated crap, that would be a horrible reason not to make the game.
Not really. Without a movie tie-in, Epic wouldn't realistically see enough of a market of interest for the game.
There are some very notable exceptions:
Advent Children from Final Fantasy 7 Prince of Persia (or at least not awful) That movie there about that game where your stuck on a derelect spaceship with space zombies. And I felt wing commander was pretty good.
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Id rather there be no game than a bad game. Its much easier to bring others into the Ender's Game without subpar media to lower expectations.
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I'm sure that wasn't the case. Again, I suspect it was an okay game, but they didn't think they'd move a ton of copies without a movie attached.
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Or it was visual and interactive offal and they dont want to to say so outloud, this particular title would garner more attention than others if they admitted that they were not up to snuff. I wouldnt want my game development company to be the ones who failed at making Ender's Game, now they are the ones who stopped making the game and we just get to question what really happened and eventually forget that they ever existed.
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quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: But if that was the case why not say so?
There's no need for Epic to involve themselves in a franchise that involves the payment of royalties to the author if marketing and demographic research can't show a significant appeal that would cause the franchise-based work to sell significantly better than if they were to invest Chair's resources into an original property that they have full ownership and creative rights to, without any royalties.
Add on top of that the fact that OSC is now notorious, viewed as homophobic, with extremely negative controversy permeating nearly any discussion about him, and Epic needs a real serious incentive to involve themselves with his franchise.
Without a movie attached, there isn't really presently one.
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Blayne Bradley
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quote:Originally posted by Nighthawk:
quote:Originally posted by Blayne Bradley: And I felt wing commander was pretty good.
*twitch!* ... *twitch!*
Oh, you mean the game was "pretty good", right?
... Right?
The game was unplayable for me at the time (mouse kept moving all weirdly) but the movie was pretty much to me what Das Boot and Reimaged Battlestar was to others earlier/later.
That and it had the kickass scenry chewing voice actor playing the admiral who was Icarus from Baldur's Gate II.
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The fact that you couldn't play the game explains why you liked the movie. Had you played the series through and enjoyed it, you would have loathed the movie.
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I'm kind of agreeing with Tom, here- it seems more likely that it was a more attractive property when there was a strong possibility of a movie association. If you're only catering to the (certainly non-trivial) audience who liked the book, you're mostly going to be hearing about how your game got it wrong.
I also can't help but feel that it's pretty difficult to release a AAA strategy game these days unless you're building onto an established franchise. An EG game doesn't even have the advantage of a familiar historical backdrop for the conflict.
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quote:The fact that you couldn't play the game explains why you liked the movie. Had you played the series through and enjoyed it, you would have loathed the movie.
I never played the games, but I hated the movie. I'm not sure "loathed" is the right word, though. Can you loathe a movie when you laugh at all the serious parts?
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Blayne Bradley
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That's called Narm, or Narm charm.
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The game, sounds like a terrible idea /: honestly, Ender's Game probably has some good mini-games though, something like space invaders in 3D for the bugger simulator...
But honestly, Ender has no super powers, no magical powers, no super strength, nothing inhuman cept' his brain power, which couldn't lift a feather ( but miraculously spawn 2 kids) --
Just face it Ender's Game as a game is failure, but Ender's Game as a movie, that's what I'll be waiting for! And it better be done right!! (For instance, Eragon was a FAILURE, completely and totally, I do not wish the same for any book->movie)
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quote:Originally posted by Rawrain: But honestly, Ender has no super powers, no magical powers, no super strength, nothing inhuman cept' his brain power, which couldn't lift a feather ( but miraculously spawn 2 kids) --
Just face it Ender's Game as a game is failure, but Ender's Game as a movie, that's what I'll be waiting for! And it better be done right!! (For instance, Eragon was a FAILURE, completely and totally, I do not wish the same for any book->movie)
Is it supposed to be impossible to make good video games without main characters who aren't superpowered now?
Eragon was also a terrible book so the movie was not a surprise.
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Batman Arkham Asylum got rave reviews all last year and Bruce Wayne never sported anything super-human. But he doesnt count, Batman doesnt need powers.
Dead Rising 1 and 2.
Mass Effect, if you use the soldier class (which is the most functional) the main character has no super-power aside from being good in a fight. Ofcourse the sequal let you slow things down for a couple of seconds but you didnt move any faster, you simply had the luxury of aiming better and a few extra shots but that could still be about combat experiance rather than radioactive wounds from animals.
Fallout series. Your just a guy in a blue jump-suit.
WoW race, Gnomes. Nothing super-human about them, actually really less than human. Oh yeah, they are really deft at causing Horde members to laugh and tell jokes about how stupid the Alliance is for having midget characters, the Horde would never... oh, cataclysm. Stupid gnomes.
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Blayne Bradley
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I liked Eragon, talking Dragons.
Ender's Game can work but probably much more like a 3D visual/sound novel that happens to have an Unreal Engine minigame and a Homeworld mini game.
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: Eragon was also a terrible book so the movie was not a surprise.
Arguably, but in fairness, whatever you thought of the book, the movie was worse. Fifty pages of book reduced to, "here, let's set your uncle's home on fire", a rate of minion kill-off that truly made one wonder why anyone bothered ever returning to the bad guy to deliver bad news, John Malkovich on a sound stage somewhere completely divorced from the rest of proceedings, orc-like minions who basically looked like they had smeared mud on some extras' faces and dressed them in rags, and yet another epic supernatural fight that involves the heroes hovering in mid-air and throwing things at each other.
quote:Originally posted by Blayne Bradley: I liked Eragon, talking Dragons.
Yeah, and talking dragons voiced by Rachel Weiss, no less. Certainly the best thing the movie had going for it. Unfortunately, I think once they paid for the dragon, Irons, Malkovich, and the gratuitous helicopter landscape shots, there wasn't much left for things like rewrites and sensible editing.
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There's a lot of strange parallels between the movie process used to turn Eragon and Golden Compass into bad movies. Eragon was a bad book and a bad movie translation process, so the end result was garish and terrible. Golden Compass was an okay book despite being the early motions of atheist spitewank so the movie was merely bad. Both fell to the same abuses of overdramatic cinema common for the time period.
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Yup. Specifically it was a micro-era of "man, LotR totally looked epic. We need to do that sort of epic stuff all the time in our movies so that they are epic too!" *sweeping cgi vistas*
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