Booo false advertising!!

[brendala]

I know I'm WAY late to the party on this one. But a few weeks ago my sister showed me an E3 trailer for a video game called 'Dead Island'. The trailer is AMAZING! And I got really excited for the game. I swear, this thing was so well done that I almost cried at the end. That's right. A video game trailer about zombies invading a beach resort almost made me cry. I'd go on, but you have to see this thing for yourself if you haven't already:


===

What would you guess is the plot of the game based solely on that trailer? I assumed that it must be about the mother of that poor little girl fighting to survive and avenge the deaths of her husband and child (since the trailer doesn't show the mother getting killed or bitten by a zombie). After all, why else would those characters be front and center in the game's trailer?

Well, turns out that the family in the trailer has NOTHING to do with the actual game. Based on the reviews I've seen, the actual game is nothing more than a generic "bland dude runs down hallways mowing down zombies with shit he finds laying around" game. The player can find the mom and dad's dead bodies in a hotel room if he looks for it (but not the little girl. Because dead children would get the game banned in most of Europe), but that's it.

Am I the only one who thinks that studio wasted a MAJOR opportunity with this game? A LOT of people were emotionally moved by this trailer and the game apparently got a ton of E3 buzz because of it. People felt for the family in the trailer and wanted to know more about them. So having the mother be the protagonist would have made a lot of people excited to buy it even if the gameplay wasn't that good (I know I would have!).

However, the fact that the family is just a hidden Easter Egg in the actual game makes the trailer feel....exploitative. Like it was just using the imagery of a cute little girl getting chomped on by zombies in front of her helpless parents because they knew it would tug on heartstrings and create buzz. But they didn't have the balls to go outside the box and make the game any different from the dozens of monster/zombie/whatever shooters starring generic white male protagonists.

Anyhoo, the moral of this rambling write up is: Don't trust video game trailers! ESPECIALLY if it has no footage of the actual game.
Also, the people responsible for the trailer should be running the company. 

Comments

[the-flowergirl.livejournal.com]

Oh my god, I BAWLED at that trailer. I actually thought it was about that family. How sad, they had something there, and they lost it.


Dead children would make something banned in Europe? Really?

[brendala.livejournal.com]

It really is. That trailer shocked and upset me when I saw it and I really felt for that family. Even if I knew the gameplay was bad, I might have bought it anyway if the mother had been the main character instead of Generic White Dude. And I bet I'm not the only one.

This company managed to get people emotionally invested in their game -despite the fact that it was a new franchise by a podunk developer- with just a trailer. It would have been the most brilliant game marketing EVER if they had only followed through by keeping one of those parents alive for the game.


Dead children would make something banned in Europe? Really?

Well, I know for a fact that having dead kids on screen and/or giving the player the ability to shoot kids would cause the game to get an automatic "M" rating in our homeland. And I've heard that it's something that'll get a game banned in Europe and Australia because their governments are WAY more touchy about "excessive violence" in games than ours.

[virus-x.livejournal.com]

Well, if Europeans can't take dead kids in a VIDEO GAME, just have the kid get back up, walk around and start chasing people. Problem solved.

[the-flowergirl.livejournal.com]

I don't even like survival horror, but I would play the hell out of that game if the story was from one of that family's POVs. Even if it was the father's.



Australian censorship is a touchy subject, as they are far more conservative than even the European government is on things. They pretty much want to rate any M rated game with a sex scene as Adult's Only, even if it's a mostly censored sex scene.

OK, I understand the queasiness of shooting children, I do, but if they'd be undead, so not quite the same?

Fuck you lj I wasn't done.

[virus-x.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'm more than a little tired of the "supermommy" BS. The father could do just as well, if not better. However, yeah, I would really consider that, at the very least, borderline false advertising. Hell, in the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series, you play several characters, because the stories move between countries, and some of you characters actually end up dying horrible deaths (like getting shot in the chest at point blank range with a .44 magnum revolver). They could've just as easily have done that with this game, moving between characters, seeing some of them not end up on the good side of zombie bum-rushes, and perhaps even facing off against the now partially devoured character. Usually, its the video game industry that gets it right, and the movie industry that gets it wrong; this is just an unfortunate case of role-reversal. Hopefully, its an isolated case.

[brendala.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying that an avenging father wouldn't be equally awesome. Just that having the mom be the protagonist for this game would have made more sense (it couldn't have been the dad since he gets bitten in the trailer). Also, few video games have female leads. And it would have been neat to get one here.

Your comment reminded me of something...
One of my favorite games (Silent Hill 1) centers around a widowed father frantically searching a zombie/monster infested town for his missing daughter. That game got adapted to the big screen a few years ago. But the film makers opted to change the main character into a woman because they didn't feel it was realistic for a dad to walk into hell to save a child that wasn't biologically his (the daughter is adopted). Needless to say, fans were PISSED!

[secondlina.livejournal.com]

The trailer is TOTALLY exploitative. But a really nice example of how you can create something emotionally investing and intriguing in a few minutes.

I think I would have preferred the game if it was, as you said, the mother on a roaring rampage of revenge. But god forbid we have a main female character in a american game with bashing (all I can say is thank god for Michonne in Walking dead. REPRESENT).

Generally, it's an okay game. Not even the best zombie rampager by far.

[brendala.livejournal.com]

Now that I think about it...aside from Lara Croft, Samus, Shantae, the girls from Fatal Frame, and the chick from Portal; I can't think of any games with female leads. That's pretty dang sad.

Maybe they didn't make the mother the lead character because it's hard to take a character defined by this kind of horrible tragedy and sex her up Lara Croft-style for GQ ads. :P

[secondlina.livejournal.com]

And we've reached the impasse in where stupid people still think ladies need to be sexy to kick ass.

Also, no one is sexy during a zombie thing. IT'S ZOMBIE BAIT. all that skin. Jeez.

[ichiban-victory.livejournal.com]

Heh, never played Metroid Fusion, did you? Samus took on zombified scientists in a power suit! No exposed skin whatsoever. :D

[ichiban-victory.livejournal.com]

I actually hate zombie games because all it ever is is a shoot fest of stupid moaning monsters...usually. If you want something a bit deeper, and *gasp* even has female characters going up against the undead, you really ought to track down Eternal Darkness. It's the only zombie/horror/suspense game I ever cared for, and its main character is not only female, but a college student at that. She uses her brains more than anything, thank goodness. ;)

[brendala.livejournal.com]

Eternal Darkness is one of those games I've always wanted to try. But I don't think I'd be able to do it because scary games freak me out. Seriously, I LOVED the story behind the Silent Hill games; but playing them got me so jittery and scared that I couldn't finish and had to find out what happened by watching "Lets Plays" on youtube.
Yeah, I'm a total wimp. ^_^;

...that reminds me. Silent Hill 3 had a really kickass (and fully clothed!) female lead.

[ichiban-victory.livejournal.com]

It's not a "scary" game exactly. It's a suspense game, sure, but it falls more into the "Call of Cthulu" world where you're trying to prevent the rise of the Ancient Ones through solving puzzles within a given time period. Seriously, the game is a lot of running around reading text, and having the plot unfold around you. There are zombies and variations on them, but they're actually few and far between.

The game is only scary in that it causes fear in you the player, more than your character on screen. (Although all bets are off should your character lose all sanity.) And that's through lighting, music, and even the tilt of the screen. Seriously, if you ever get the chance, try it. I hate zombie/horror games, but Eternal Darkness was unique.

Here's the first part of the game, to give you an idea how it played: