151: Silver Screen Button Mashing

Stephen Colfer

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May 23, 2008
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Silver Screen Button Mashing

"There's been some pretty bad offenders over the years. Malcolm in the Middle had mysterious game-less Game Boys. Every soap has the generic kids sitting in front of a TV that produces R2-D2-like sounds. And then there was 2006's "horror porn without the porn" flop Stay Alive. But there have also been rare gems such as South Park's "Make Love, Not Warcraft" that have managed to stay faithful to the games they portray, earning fame on TeamSpeak channels across the internet."

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Feb 13, 2008
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Thinking on how often Games and Gameing has turned up there have been some good/some bad

Randall & Hopkirk : Deceased : Showed Randall (Bob Mortimer) playing a video game that became a focus for Marty Hopkirk (Vic Reeves) : Not overly accurate, but at least it felt like he was playing.
X-Files/Buffy for the D&D nerds...Like, whatever!
Motormouth (Sat Morning UK) had a section on Weird Dreams, which was basically a point/click game where right answers solved the mini quests. Wrong got you killed.
KnightMare both helped and harmed the LARP'ers.
Hackers : Well...it wasn't THAT bad.
BITS, Bad Influence, Games Mistress : These reviewers have breasts!

And then we have Independence Day (he tried to install Windows)

I think perhaps the problem is that you can still promote football without knowing the offside rule; but unless you have some sort of stake in the outcome, computer games just don't make good television.
 

Karisse

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Apr 16, 2008
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The_root_of_all_evil said:
I think perhaps the problem is that you can still promote football without knowing the offside rule; but unless you have some sort of stake in the outcome, computer games just don't make good television.
As the lone gamer in my group of friends at college, whenever I talk about gaming I usually get blank stares and jokes about me being crazy. And then they discuss whatever was on TV. It's been my experience that most avid TV viewers are seldom gamers and vice versa, so it's a lot easier to make jokes about gamers rather than for gamers. More people can relate to laughing about their friend who plays video games because they just don't care about gaming.
 

Drong

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Oct 31, 2007
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Great article, also the episode of Spaced where he was playing tomb raider

Brian - What's that?
Tim - Tomb Raider 3
Brian - She's drowning. Is that the point of the game?
Tim - Depends how you're feeling really

Brilliant
 

Trevel

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May 27, 2008
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-- Scrubs works hard to be accurate on its medical details?

We're talking about the same show that puts an x-ray up backwards in its title sequence? The one that thinks that veterinarians are simply doctors who need a second job?

If you think that Scrubs is accurate on medical details, all that proves is that you're as ignorant about medicine as they are about video games.
 

lightbulbthief

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Jan 16, 2008
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spaced is great, its done resident evil 2, tomb raider 3, tekken, time crisis and im sure theres another one, anyway the RE2 one was when they got the idea to do a zombie film and so shuan of the dead was born(which has a couple frames of timesplitters 2 in it).
 

hasam

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Feb 1, 2008
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Trevel said:
-- Scrubs works hard to be accurate on its medical details?

We're talking about the same show that puts an x-ray up backwards in its title sequence? The one that thinks that veterinarians are simply doctors who need a second job?

If you think that Scrubs is accurate on medical details, all that proves is that you're as ignorant about medicine as they are about video games.
The Scrubs writers work with at least two medical advisers, they might still get things wrong here and there but they certainly try :)
 

conzy

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Jan 31, 2008
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Nice Article :)

The "De-Rez" Movie is already made and it's not necessarily a "De-Rez" Movie, Just happened to be made by some of the "De-Rez" folks ;)

btw in an episode of scrubs they made fun of the backwards X-Ray, Dr Kim turns it around the right way and says "That's been buggin me for years!" :D

http://youtube.com/watch?v=XCXqe0vjG6g
 

SonofSeth

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Dec 16, 2007
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It never realy bothered me much, I just always thought it was a shame they couldn't put in that 0,5% more effort to make it right.
 

PedroSteckecilo

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Feb 7, 2008
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I recall Shaun and Ed (in Shaun of the Dead) playing Timesplitters 2, and noting that it sounded nothing like the actual product. Oddly jarring in the end.
 

Ed_Winchester

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Nov 20, 2007
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u2nduLOdfk

just incase anyone is intrested in seeing a trailer for suckers the movie metioned in this article
 

NeW SpEcTrUM

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Mar 14, 2008
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lightbulbthief said:
spaced is great, its done resident evil 2, tomb raider 3, tekken, time crisis and im sure theres another one, anyway the RE2 one was when they got the idea to do a zombie film and so shuan of the dead was born(which has a couple frames of timesplitters 2 in it).
Darn it, you stole what I was gonna stay. When I saw that, it was probably the first movie with I saw with an actual game in it. I even recognized it as the Neo Tokyo level. The only problem with that though was the corny "Player 2 has joined the game." soundbit they had...
 

L.B. Jeffries

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Nov 29, 2007
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I thought '40 Year Old Virgin' pretty much nailed what it's like to play Mortal Kombat: Armageddon. Mash buttons, pray something violent happens, drink beer.
 

kingliving

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May 28, 2008
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A movie which also seems to have got it is Ben X (belgian)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0953318/
Just so you know
 

ccesarano

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Oct 3, 2007
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L.B. Jeffries said:
I thought '40 Year Old Virgin' pretty much nailed what it's like to play Mortal Kombat: Armageddon. Mash buttons, pray something violent happens, drink beer.
Funny thing about that, actually. When I saw that movie with my friends and they showed the guys playing Halo 2, I was like "wait, that's taken from the 2003 E3 single player footage. That didn't actually make it into the game". I also spotted several Godzilla figures and other things around the apartment that I recognized. My friends all found it to be madly humorous that I'm geek enough to spot all these things.


On topic of the article, I must say that I CANNOT stand the very concept of Big Bang Theory. Maybe it is because I go to RIT and know plenty of other geeks and nerds that aren't the pocket-protector-buck-toothed-snorting-awkward-virgin stereotype, which is what the main characters of the show all are. I much prefer Spaced because Simon Pegg himself is an avid geek and gamer, and the shows and films he works on with Edgar Wright and co. shows it. I also enjoyed Chuck, because, even though they'll get some details wrong, for the most part you can tell geeks are behind it. More to the point, while the main characters are all clearly geeks, they aren't an outdated stereotype that plays us all out as being pathetic losers who can't interact with "normal people".

I also think Reign Over Me [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0490204/] should have a special note here, as one of the film's writers or producers (can't recall which) wanted to make sure that the scenes where Adam Sandler's character was gaming were accurate. They used Shadow of the Colossus to create a metaphor for Sandler's character and what he was going through, so in one way it was being used artistically. Also, in the scene where Sandler is showing Don Cheadle's character how to play, they didn't have a script. Sandler had played the game a bit, so they basically just recorded the two playing and talking about the game as themselves. They even show a trailer where Sandler is like "now you wanna stab it in the wing", and they show that exact boss from the game.

This is what needs to be done, instead of, say, Free Willy 3, where the kid is playing Star Fox on the SNES, fighting the boss at the end of the first level, and when he is told to shut off the game he says "but I'm almost at ten thousand points, mom!". Anyone that grew up in the 90's knows that isn't how games worked anymore.

....as for what I was doing watching Free Willy 3, well, sometimes you get bored and put the TV on anything.
 

KBKarma

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May 14, 2008
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Ooo. I was right: some of deRez's cast/crew are Irish.

Well, I'll be seeing Suckers.

I've always got annoyed by this in films and TV shows. The most obvious example being the ever-wonderful Inside Man. Kid playing an ultra-violent GTA-clone on a PSP. My mom turns to me in horror and says "Is that a real game?"

That's the sort of thing that actually HURTS gaming.
 

[ANZAC]Ghost

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Apr 30, 2008
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Trevel said:
-- Scrubs works hard to be accurate on its medical details?

We're talking about the same show that puts an x-ray up backwards in its title sequence? The one that thinks that veterinarians are simply doctors who need a second job?

If you think that Scrubs is accurate on medical details, all that proves is that you're as ignorant about medicine as they are about video games.
Scrubs was voted as as one of the more accurate Medical dramas, not sure by who. Having never worked in a hospital I wouldn't know. As for the flipped x-ray, that was actually a joke, in one of the episodes Molly flips it back.
 

BlindMessiah94

The 94th Blind Messiah
Nov 12, 2009
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great article. This kind of stuff always bugs me. Like when people in a tv show are using a computer and apparently clickety clacking every button on the keyboard makes magical things appear when a simple mouse click would suffice.
 

Orange Monkey

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Mar 16, 2009
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Fantastic article. I always hated how all on screen gamers madly slam on their controllers like they're trying to break the darn things.