Booo false advertising!!
Jan. 6th, 2012 12:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brendalaI 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:
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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.
===
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.
