Tag: Movie Games

Movie Games: Ice Age (2002)

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Welcome to another edition of Movie Games the series where we look at licensed games from the past and see how much they follow the plot of their movie, this time around we will be covering the 2002 classic Ice Age from Blue Sky Studios which had only one videogame for the Gameboy Advance.

But before we dive into that first lets go over the plot of the movie spoilers ahead so beware!

Scrat the Sabertooth Squirrel accidently cracks open the earth and causes a large avalanche which he barely escapes but is trod on by a herd heading south to avoid the forthcoming Ice Age.

A clumsy sloth named Sid wakes up to find he has been abandoned by his family so he moves south by himself, he upsets a pair of rhinos and is recued by a grumpy mammoth named Manny the two continue to travel south together much to Manny’s annoyance.

Meanwhile Soto leader of the saber tooth tigers attacks a human village trying to eat the chiefs baby as an act of revenge for the killing of his pack members, the village is destroyed but the baby is no where in sight, a member of the pack Diego is sent on a personal mission to find the child and bring him to Soto alive and ready for consumption.

Sid and Manny discover the baby and its mother floating in a river, they manage to receive the baby before the mother loses her last strength and drowns.

Diego catches up with the duo and encourages them to give him the baby so he can take him back to his tribe on Half Peak, Manny agrees as long as they all go with Diego leading them so he can be watched.

Our trio continue their adventure across the treacherous and icy land getting into many shenanigans including a water melon fight with Dodo’s and a rather dangerous ice slide.

Eventually they come across cave paintings and one set of a mother and baby Mammoth being murdered by hunters, this turns out to be Manny’s previous family and the reason why he keeps to himself.

At the end of the movie Diego nearly falls to his death in a river of lava but is rescued by Manny, when they arrive at Half Peak, Diego confesses his betrayal and the trio are attacked, Diego takes a near fatal blow during the final battle with the Sabers, Soto is killed instantly when he is impaled with falling icicles causing the rest of his pack to retreat in fear.

Manny and Sid mourn Diego believing him to be dead and finally return the baby to its tribe, Diego joins them afterward when he has more strength.

The trio now closer than ever remain as a pack and walk together towards warmer climates.

In a post credits scene twenty thousand years into the future Scrat is washed up in a block of ice on a deserted island, when he is thawed he manages to find a coconut which he again tries to bury by smashing it into the ground causing the earth to crack and a volcano to erupt…. whoops

now over to the video game adaptation

The game is a fairly standard 2D platformer with players starting at point A and needing to get to point B and normally having to defeat a boss at the end of most levels.

You play the game interchanging between Manny and Sid who each star in their own stages.

Manny sees the most action as he has the majority of levels, his stages are fairly basic in design he moves slowly because of his large size but can use his trunk for both physical attacks and for shooting nuts.

Sid’s stages are side scrollers and they are just awful, the screen moves way too fast to the point where one tiny mistake you will die, you don’t have time to make decisions on how to tackle certain jumps or avoiding enemies and the absolute worst is that you have barely anytime to grab the acorns!

Acorns are a collectible you can find all over stages with each level giving players a goal to find 40, the acorns basically work as a life system, you take damage you lose one and that will leave you with less chance to make the goal.

If you do manage to collect all 40 acorns in each of the 10 levels you will get a pretty lame bonus stage that is really not worth effort in my opinion, it doesn’t offer anything new and has all of problems of the other levels.

The basic gameplay is fine and you can tell that a lot of inspiration for this game actually came from Donkey Kong Country.

The stages are riddled with Dodo’s and other creatures which can be defeated by hitting them or bouncing on them, sometimes you have bounce across them or slam the ground to flip certain enemies over and then bounce on them … you seeing the similarities here?

In this games defence on a short budget they did an ok job, it is far from perfect with issues such as off screen platforms to jump too, unnecessary back tracking, bad hit detection and of course way too fast side scrolling but if you can look past all of this it has unlimited lives and with patience you can then experience the surprisingly pretty well designed boss fights.

There are various battles in the game and all of them are fought by Manny, there are these giant seeds in levels that can be used as ammunition against larger creatures and bosses.

The bosses each have various designs and require different strategies to defeat, there are two ways to defeat boss one is as mentioned with the seeds and the other is by slamming onto them, how you can achieve this will differ between boss variants but overall is really easy and wont take very long to figure out.

Graphically the budget didn’t stretch very far with this, some fairly low quality pixel art is used for character sprites, the backgrounds are pretty impressive and have a lot more detail even managing to keep up with the fast auto scrolling segments.

The soundtrack is pretty decent for a licenced game and the real issue is the lack of tracks and how much they replay the same small tune on a loop it can get a little annoying but thanks to this games short length of around 1 hour it doesn’t drag on too long that it becomes a problem.

So how closely does Ice Age GBA follow the movie?

Well lets be honest apart from a few screen captures from the film at the beginning and ending, this game goes in a complete different direction to the film and while I think this does work a lot in its favour allowing for some variants in boss fights and enemies, I think it’s departure missed out on so many opportunities for levels based on movie scenes, we could have had Sid running towards the screen while jumping obstacles and avoiding the Rhino’s or a fun slide level based in the Ice Caves. The biggest sin of all is that they never made a stage based on the memory sequence with Manny’s family, it would have been a great opportunity to change the art style and make some more creative choices that tie into the script.

While this isn’t exactly a faithful adaptation I wouldn’t go out of my way to call it a good video game either, effort was made to try and do something creative here and while I will say that for a knock off DKC clone this is far from terrible it failed in so many ways with its gameplay issues, repetitive soundtrack and uninspired visuals that all that it truly has left for its self is the creative boss battles and an overall simple experience for very young gamers. 3.8/10

I think for our next movie game we will jump into Ice Age the Meltdown to see if lessons were learnt from this.

see you then …. p.s there are three versions of that one so wish me luck !

Padawan

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Movie Games: ELF (2003)

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Welcome the second edition of Movie Games a series where we look at a film and then its video game counterparts to not only discuss a games quality but how accurate of an adaptation it is.

In this Christmas episode I will be deep diving into the the 2003 comedy film ELF starring Will Ferrell, this movie only had one videogame adaptation releasing on the Nintendo Gameboy Advance the same year as the film.

First a Recap of the movie and I wont be shy on spoilers so be wary!

On Christmas Eve a baby from an orphanage crawls into Santa’s Sack and is taken to the North Pole, an older Elf agrees to raise the baby and 30 years later the now adult and much taller Buddy is struggling to fit in with the elves, he finds out he is a human and decides to travel to New York City to find his real father Walter Hobbs.

Buddy passed through the seven levels of the Candy Cane forest, through the sea of swirly twirly gum drops, and then walked through the Lincoln Tunnel.

Upon arrival in New York Buddy is searching everywhere for his Father, causing havoc along the way, eating discarded gum, running around evolving doors and jumping across zebra crossings.

He finds his father in the Empire state building but is soon thrown out after Security is called by Walter Hobbs himself, the security sarcastically suggests Buddy goes back to Gimbels.

Taking the request literally Buddy goes into the department store and is mistaken for an employee of Santa’s Village here he meets the friendly but unenthusiastic Jovie, Buddy is so excited for Santa coming to visit the store that he stays behind over night to decorate the store. The next morning Santa comes to the store but its an imposter, Buddy rips off his beard and a fight ensues, Buddy is arrested but bailed out by Walter Hobbs who takes him to a doctor for a DNA test which proves a positive match!

Walter reluctantly takes his Son home to meet his wife Emily and his other son Michael, Walter doesn’t warm up to Buddy as quickly as Emily does and wants to throw him out onto the streets but Emily insists that Buddy stays with them until he recovers from his fantasies.

Buddy soon becomes a friend of Michael after he defeats his school bullies in an epic snowball fight, the two mess around the Gimbles department store and bump into Jovie, Michael encourages Buddy to ask her out and she says yes, after the date goes really well Buddy runs to his dads works to tell him that he is in love not knowing that world renowned author Miles Finch is there.

Finch who is short in stature is mistaken for an Elf by Buddy and his extremely offended walking out on his deal with Walter, Walter in a rage tells buddy to stay out of his life, buddy leaves and writes a goodbye letter to his family, while making his way back through New York City he spots Santa’s Sleigh crashed at Central Park, the Sleigh runs on Christmas Spirit but it had finally ran out and Santa asks Buddy to help him get it back.

Meanwhile Walter is now in another meeting with the CEO of the company after he finds Miles Finches notebook which is full of ideas, Michael bursts in and emotionally convinces Walter to choose family over work losing his job in the process, Walter and Michael find buddy in Central Park, the two makeup and help Buddy with his mission, Walter dresses as Santa to try and divert the Park Rangers while Michael takes Santa’s list and reads it on live TV convincing viewers of Santa’s existence.

Jovie remembers when Buddy told her “The best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear” and begins singing Santa Claus is coming to town, the New Yorkers all join in and even Walter gets in on the action finally giving the sleigh enough power to fly again. In the finale we see Buddy spending Christmas with his family and the following year visiting his Papa Elf in the North Pole along with his Wife Jovie and their baby Susie, a truly happy ending.

The GBA videogame is a 2D platformer and for the most part it controls fine but the game is really bare bones when it comes to its gameplay, this is as generic as 2D platformers can get.

I will give some props to the game for adding various goals into some stages such as collecting all of Christmas Lights and the letters to spell NEWYORK.

Other stages are designed as either top down platformers or minigames, the worst of these stages is easily jumping across the Icebergs, this stage had really bad issues with landing, in most cases you would hit the water when you had definitely landed on the iceberg but because it wasn’t centred the game took that as a miss, the stage is very long and at some points the platforms you need land on are moving which makes it even worse.

Jumping is very floaty in the game in all platforming levels, the iceberg was definitely the worst offender but some other simple platforming such as jumping over the polar bears also proved to be needlessly difficult at times.

The minigame stages are all fine but very generic and extremely easy, examples of what to expect are the usual repeat the button presses, link up the pipes and hit the targets, minigame staples that we see in almost any game.

I’m not going to criticise the game on being generic as that’s almost expected from this, what I will criticise however is how lazy this adaptation actually is they use screenshots from the movie with no dialogue text to give players any idea on what is going on and to top this off the levels are not even accurate to movie.

Small errors such as the snowball fight including elves instead of school bullies,a lack of Walter Hobbs and his family (minus one screenshot at the end of the game) levels with plots including collecting Christmas lights, helping Santa deliver presents and a very small number of movie screenshots which no context make me wonder if this was released either before the movie or developed by a team who had no idea of the plot, needless to say its a pretty lame game and an even worse movie adaptation.

The soundtrack is awful we are only given some very simple audio loops or really bad chiptunes of Christmas songs just another another way to rush development and give the game even less originality.

This Christmas watch the movie but do yourself a favour and skip the GBA game!

2.7/10

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