I have stopped going to the movies. After realizing that I have not loved a movie since The Royal Tenenbaums of last fall, I gave up. I have finally figured it out why there are so few good ones: All the brilliant ideas and daring originality that were once a hallmark of good filmmaking have been sucked up by an increasingly vital game industry.
For proof one need look no further than Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, an amazing survival-horror game from Silicon Knights. The game begins as Alexandra Roivas, exploring the mansion of her murdered grandfather, discovers documents revealing a centuries-old battle against a great evil. This battle has enlisted many people, including a Roman soldier, a Cambodian dancer and a journalist, and the player becomes each in turn, battling monsters on the way to what is almost inevitably a gruesome death.
As you confront these monsters, you will lose your mind. The game has a sanity meter that drains with each encounter. As your mind dissolves, statues turn to look at you, blood drips from the ceiling, and you hallucinate. You might, for instance, go through a door, walk down a hallway, have your head fall off, and then with a flash discover yourself standing behind the door once again, screaming, "This can't be happening!"
These hallucinations are wonderfully entertaining and can range from an overwhelming zombie attack to such modern terrors as a message that the game positions that you saved have just been deleted. There are ways to regain sanity, but the hallucinations are so much fun that you are likely to prefer madness.
There are only a few locations in the game, but you revisit these places in different eras, so the dark, gloomy stone walls of a Cambodian temple in the 12th century are crumbling and vine-covered by the 20th. Each character will have different weapons available, ranging from a heavy club to an elephant gun, and the game has an interesting battle system in which you can choose different body parts as targets.
If you chop off a living skeleton's head, for example, it will blindly stagger around until it finds something to attack. Several headless skeletons can wind up killing one another while you watch from a safe distance.
Eternal Darkness is well designed, exciting, involving and full of brilliant ideas. Even though gaming is a billion-dollar industry and a game like this one can take years to produce, there is still a sense that it was created by a bunch of young computer geeks sitting around saying, "Wouldn't it be really cool if we did something like this?"
That may be why Wes Craven signed on to direct a movie based on the game American McGee's Alice before its release and why film studios are negotiating for rights to the coming vampire game Blood Rayne. Hollywood knows where the ideas are.
It's not just that games have the best ideas: They also offer the best product placement, at least in the case of the action-adventure game Darkened Skye, the world's longest Skittles commercial.
When the Spider-Man movie's Peter Parker started his web target practice by putting a can of soda in the exact center of the movie screen with the logo facing the camera, I was thoroughly annoyed. But when Skye, a shepherdess turned warrior, was informed by a wise old woman that the little colored mystical object she had found was a Skittle, I thought that it was funny.
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