<Gonna do this on my own...>

Sunday, October 29, 2006

as promised, my DOA review..
just be warned its going to be a nasty one.

'Dead Or Alive, the game, brought a whole new level of reality fighting (and also abit of out-of-this-world moves) and fun to the XBox (and previously PS2). Packed together with awesome fighters and hot babes (check that spinoff Xtreme Beach Volleyball game), Team Ninja established a pretty good fighting franchise.

Now let's see...

Game-turned-movies, in the recent few years, have been in a word, rubbish.

Resident Evil was a prime example. For non gamers, resident evil was a popular zombie-horror game for the PS and gained much prominence in the RPG genre. The gamer would control a character throughout the game and have to navigate his way out, having to blast through hordes of zombies and similar living organisms with numerous firearms (love that rocket launcher)

u know the thing about movies adapting from games? they tend to change alot of things. like storyline or some of the mechanics... overall, the movie makes the game look bad and itself worse.

Note that for me to truly enjoyed game-turned-movies, the movie has to STICK to every feature of the game. So not as to incense hardcore gamers and fans of whichever game is to produced onto the big screen. By also sticking to the original game script, it does good publicity for the actual game to newcomers and may actually receive rave reviews.

anyway back to the resident evil movie on why it sucked.

The game featured creeping, moaning zombies.
The movie featured the opposite. RUNNING, SCREECHING ZOMB... no wait, people with bloodshot eyes.
A team of agents had to go down to a research lab deep underground and find out what was it that made all its inhabitants... disappear..
and so blah blah, they find that they didnt actually disappear and then they decide OH OK LETS ERMM GET THE HELL OUTTA HERE HEHEHE.
Granted, there were abit bits of the storyline was a bit intriguing, but still, no concrete impact to make me go wow.

for resident evil: apocalyse, it was complete utter... trash.
the movie focused mainly on the viral breakout (that turns everyone into zombies) in the city. so the govt decides to send in a bunch of dudes to wipe everyone out and then at the end, launch a nuclear warhead to completely swipe everything.
ok, they had missus jill valentine with her blue tube, they had the mercenaries working for Umbrella, they had nearly everything adapted from Resident Evil 3..

except to my horror, they made the NEMESIS (which in the game was a badass advanced zombie) a freakin cyborg.
im sure all other fans feel the same way.

.........

and save for that last part in the movie, where everything just made no sense.
(the sub-main character is actually something else that u expect. and the whole motley crew survives.. but Umbrella is in Europe still conducting tests)
that ruined the entire storyplot and I was disappointed.
Disappointed that the second chance to do a good game-based-movie of the same series was utter rubbish...

oh yeah, DOA..

well bringing resident evil into the picture was just to give u some backgrd info and also a gist of what im roughly gonna say about DOA.

anyway, the DOA game, as mentioned in my first sentence, consists of fighters of different martial arts styles in a -duke-it-out- VS fighting game. The one reason why its popular is because of those hot babes... but thats another issue.

DOA the movie turns out actually, just like the previous Street Fighter movies, to be nothing more than a silly adaptation of the original games.

The story goes as: fighters from around the world get invited to take part in a tournament where there can only be one winner..
They all fight, then get trapped by the villian, who uses this technology to absorb their fighting data, absorbs them and then sells it to the world.

there's only one word to describe it. and it starts with C.

Note that the actresses are hot, but still, that doesnt stop them from making the storyline look so cliched. Furthermore, isnt each fighter supposed to have her own style?
Well not, because they all had one common fighting style in the movie dammit. I think it was proably some styles of wushu, but still, no attempt to stick to the game's script.

Onto the usual suspects...

U've got ninja princess Kasumi, who is hell bent on finding her all-so-powerful ninja brother, Hayate, who disappeared in the same tourny the year before.

U've got Tina Armstrong, your texas-pro wrestler who is really... nothing much.

U've got Christie, a hot thief who takes part in the tourny to find... errmm cash. wow!

U've got Helena, a cutesy bubbly ignorant girl who was a wallflower most of the time.

And U've got Ayane, a ninja assassin sent by Kasumi's clan to kill her because she left to search for her brother.

....

have i seen this somewhere before? oh yeah, Street Fighter.

in any case, DOA movie incorporates the features of a lousy movie: no brainer storyline, just action and hot babes, stupid villain idea and all that leads to a waste of time.

In summary, if future directors are inspired to make games go onto the big screen, PLEASE DON'T.
Chances of 99.99% guarantee it'll be trash.
having said that, i hope someone hasnt begun thinking of making Metal Gear Solid into a movie. oh please i hope not.'

rating: 0.5 outta 5.