Arnold
Schwarzenegger. Large. Inarticulate. Large. Richer and more famous than
you'll ever be, possibly because he is, after all, quite large. Still,
you can't deny that action films like Terminator, Total Recall, and
Last Action Hero made the most of his size in roles that the studio
fridge wasn't quite spry enough to manage on its own. And he at least
deserves to be allowed to forget any and all forays he made into comedy.
The world would probably be a better place if the memory of Junior were
erased from mankind's collective consciousness.
Unfortunately,
several of these movies have also been adapted to video game format,
usually platformers. The phrase "Based on the hit motion picture"
is usually enough to make long-time gamers cringe and cross their legs
in horrific anguish. Quick show of hands, who has played Total Recall?
While Predator doesn't exactly reach that level of pure crap, it certainly
strives.
If
you've been alive for more than ten years you've probably at least heard
of Predator. However, long before the Predators became a Power Rangeresque
Alien-battling force, or fought Batman, Predator was a sci-fi thriller
movie about a group of commandos being systematically stalked by a mysterious
otherwordly hunter.
The
first thing you'll notice about this adaption is the color palette is
rather bright. I'm not sure if the odd, irradiated shot of Ah-nold on
the opening screen is supposed to represent the Predator's heat vision,
or what. It then fades to grey and is replaced by a similar shot of
the predator itself. Get used to these two images. Apparently the developers
decided to make them half the graphics in the game, flashing them between
stages, game over, and starts screens. They're probably in the ending
too, if one had the patience to actually finish this excuse for a Contra
clone.
I
didn't mean to insult Contra with that casual comparison. This game
just makes me lash out sometimes. As a child, the stage 2 background
music (which sounds like a pair of synthesizer keyboardists doing some
heavy breathing in a broom closet) stuck in my brain almost as profoundly
as the on-sight nausea I suffer from playing Abadox. I honestly used
to throw up playing that game. Essentially, the game is made up of cheap
deaths, bottomless pits, and nonsensical improvised enemies. Three stages
in, I had yet to see the Predator itself outside of the endlessly looping
title animation and game over screen (mostly the game over screen...)
There were plenty of scorpions and Viet Cong soldiers, though, as well
as some bizarre, round things that look for all the world to be sentient
bowls of bubbling soup.
Arnold
is armed with his fists; the first level gives you a machine gun or
grenades at the very start. I say or because he drops one when he picks
up the other. The machine gun is by far the most useful; it allows you
to attack while ducking, attack at a distance, and most importantly
doesn't stand a chance of blowing you up with a stray bounce. Another
odd thing about the grenades, the display at the top of the screen dubs
them as "Pine." I can only speculate as to how that happened;
the game was made in America (right?!) The grenades can either be dropped
and ran away from, or tossed at an awkward, unusable angle more likely
to get you caught in an explosion than any enemy. Ah yes, and enemies
respawn every time you leave the screen. Neat huh? Arnold also tends
to be a poster child for inertia. It's difficult at best to make it
through a jumping section without either skidding off the edge or falling
short. There's even a point in stage 2 where the only way to continue
is to take a leap of faith off the top of the screen to land on a narrow
strip of ground, the closer platform being inhabited by a bowl of living
soup that apparently can hit hard enough to lift a 300-pound Austrian
off his feet.
The
scorpions and guerillas were easy enough to rationalize: Oh, he's in
the jungle, that's where scorpions and crazy people come from. But by
level three, the designers decided to give up entirely and have him
fight bloblike ghosts and fireball-shooting plants. He also gets the
laser rifle in this stage. I'm not sure when exactly that happened in
the film, possibly after the part where the flying saucer full of men
from Ork landed and dropped off the magic fortune teller machine that
turned the little kid into Tom Hanks. Oh yeah, and by the way, the screenshot
at left is actually from this Predator game. Apparently they decided
to go for a nice, basic spaceship design. The truth may be out there,
but frankly, I don't want to know what inspired this scene. Maybe a
ten-year old son of a developer really wanted his dad to put his crayon
drawing of the "Predeter Ship"(sic) into the game.
I
had a wonderful idea for a horror story. I call it "Predater."
A young writer goes to have his manuscript copyrighted, only to find
that an alien has stolen it and travelled back in time to secure the
rights before the book was written. It may be a little ahead of its
time, though. And it may be difficult to get the permits to films the
climactic shootout in the Library of Congress between the author and
the Predater, as the alien mothership attempts to hack into the Dewey
Decimal System.
In
summary, let me restate the obvious: If a game is based on a movie,
it usually sucks. Or, at least that used to be the rule; I hear Spider-Man
is pretty good. At least game-to-movie adaptions are still open for
this kind of generalization. And the odd game-movie-game is fair game
by default.