One of the biggest surprises about the long awaited movie adaptation of Alan Moore's seminal 'V for Vendetta', aside from the fact it was to be directed by two directors known less for their apt handling of complex moral intricacies and more for stilted dialog and scenes of people being shot in slow motion, was the lack of a video game tie in. The movie (as opposed to the comic) just seemed ripe for a quick and dirty cash in. Squatted out quickly by an overworked development team (probably working for E.A or working for a company that's working for E.A or working for a company that's working for a .... yeah) and quickly shoveled onto 360, ps3, wii, ds, psp, the ngage or anything else they can shoehorn it into with as little trouble as possible. Just imagine it. The lithe, easy to render, figure of V complete with regenerating health and a rocket launcher stalking around London murdering vaguely Orwellian thugs and dishing out his odd brand of rhyming one liners as he goes. It would have been a travesty yes, but perhaps a profitable one.
Now with the release of the saliva inducing trailer of Moore's best work to date [http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/watchmen/] 'Watchmen' I can't help but think while the publishers took the subtle route with the marketing for V perhaps Watchmen won't be so lucky.
Now don't get me wrong, not every movie tie in is terrible. There's Chronicles of Riddick which was okay and uh... well Quantum of Solace looks pretty good I suppose, but if they were going to do a Watchmen game right, they would have done it long before now.
So this is to whichever 3rd string development team that gets the uneasy task of taking a much loved franchise and turning it into a gross Frankenstein monster at the behest of an unfeeling corporate giant. Follow these guidelines and the game might not suck. That much.
1: We want to play as Rorschach. Not the Night Owl, not Dr Manhattan, certainly not the Silk Spectre Ozymandias, maybe the Comedian, but especially Rorschach.
Let me share something with you here. Rorschach is the best character in the series, bar none. Two parts batman to one part Charles Bronson in death wish Rorschach is the very definition of badass.
Now you may be tempted (or pressured by management) to include all of the active heroes in the series so you can please all of the fans at once or at least sell more action figures. Take my advice and make a stand on this one. One of the things Watchmen established early on in the series is that the masked heroes of the story are fallible, neurotic and ultimately, with the exception of Dr. Manhattan and perhaps Ozymandias, fairly ineffective. By the time the story of the Watchmen takes place the heroes, who were never exactly supermen to begin with, are made even less useful by old age, weariness and in the Night Owl's case, a hefty paunch.
Not so with Rorschach.
While all the other characters wax lyrical about the human condition Rorschach is busy throwing people out of windows, breaking fingers at random and just generally being a vicious psychopath. Essentially, he's like Batman if he were real.
Can you even imagine what the tutorial would be like for a game featuring Rorschach? Press A to enter the fridge. Press Right trigger to leap out of the fridge and punch and old man in the face. Press B to shoot a policeman in the chest with a god damn grappling gun. Press Y to kill a man with a toilet seat.
It would be awesome.
2: It must be a Brawler
Now don't get me wrong, sneaking up on people is great and Rorschach (we've already established that we only want to play as Rorschach) often sneaks up on people, but only so it hurts more when he punches them in the face.
Forget sneaking past guards or driving cars in a sandbox environment. Those are obvious examples of features that look good on the back of the box but actually irritate the crap out of gamers in practice. What's needed are nice big stretches of new York with plenty of walls to climb (a little bit Assassin's Creed climbing is fine, as long as we get to measure the distance we've climbed by how long it takes a random person to hit the ground when we throw them off a building) and most importantly, a never ending stream of victims. Rapists, Muggers, Serial Killers, Parole Offenders, people with traffic tickets, any kind of criminal will do.
Make sure the world is populated with plenty of environmental and makeshift weapons. Think Assasins creed meets 'The Warriors'. I want to be able to beat hilarious dressed 1980's thugs to death with busted TV's, lampposts, cricket bats, toilet seats, other thugs and anything else I can get my hands on.
You could throw in some God of War style minigames while I'm breaking someone's fingers or throwing them down an elevator shaft if you feel the need to but make sure you get the 'hurled through a window' physics right first.
3: You must not follow the plot of the comic too closely
This one sounds a little odd I know as most comic book adaptations make the mistake of abandoning the plot of the comics in favour of a back story more suited to slowmotion gunfights and adverts for Nike shoes. 'Watchmen' on the other hand judging from the trailer and the Director's treatment of '300' (which did happen to get a crappy tie in) the movie will stick quite closely to the story of the comic book. Which is great. But chances are, being a games developer, you've read the comic and you'll know that the series wasn't exactly action packed. Sure we had Rorschach doing all this cool stuff, but a lot of the truly awesome stuff he did was done off panel or merely talked about in hushed voices by the other characters. The series as a whole was more about the human condition and perceptions of morality than it was about awesome violence. Rorschach himself was supposed to be the human embodiment of Objectivism rather than the human embodiment of Defenestration [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestration] as I've made hIm out to be. Now while this makes for great reading in comic book form it does not make for a particularly exciting video game So how about setting the story a few years before the events of the comic? In the so called golden years of the heroes. Not only would this give you some freedom in terms of storyline (you would no longer need a weak excuse for having Rorschach say, travel to Nepal and throw someone off of mount everest) and allow you to add in some of the oft mention but never seen Villains present in the series.
Also you may recall that the original story does not end all that well for our intrepid hero when he's forced to make a choice between his principles and the future of mankind. Again fantastic on paper but very unsatisfying when you've just fought your way through a million bad guys only to (spoiler) have your character killed by a bright blue Yule Brenner (end spoiler)
Remember how one of the Matrix game tie ins (the one that didn't suck) Shiny's 'Path of Neo' completely did away the dodgy ending of the film series and added a bizarre completely non canonical end boss battle with a giant Agent Smith composed out of lots of smaller Agent Smiths and bits of breeze block. Neo then got to beat the crap out this giant Mega Smith and rock out to 'we are the champions' an ending that not only made the game a better experience, but actually delivered a more satisfying conclusion than the movie did.
Now I'm not saying you're going to out write Alan Moore because let's be honest, there's no hope of that even on one of his bad days (Promethea) but perhaps the watchmen game could try something similar. Instead of being rewarded with the thought provoking and morally grey original ending when the player finally beats the game he/she is instead greeted by a quick interview with the developers detailing what they changed and why. Then Rorschach beats Ozymandias to death with a coffee table. Roll Credits.
